"Foreign-born residents with advanced degrees start companies, create jobs, and drive innovation at an especially high rate…Welcoming a wider pool of highly educated immigrants would lead to more start-ups, more innovation, and more jobs."

"We can even consider a program that grants foreign graduates of our sophisticated math, science, engineering and business programs a work visa with their diploma."

"We can start that process by making sure that graduates of elite foreign universities who receive degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics have the ability to immigrate to the United States if they so choose."

"...With free markets and private property, a need for immigrant labor becomes obvious. Make it easy and legal with a generous visitor worker program."

"I do think we need more people coming to this nation who want to be Americans
to grow this economy."

"…firms need more of these graduates, which is one reason we should allow more foreign-born students to study in the U.S. We need to empower established companies to recruit and hire the talent they need."

- Nick Shultz, DeWitt Wallace Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

"What the United States has left is its brains and still-unmatched ability to design and market the next big thing. In a country where economic success depends largely on innovation, it is worth noting that… that nearly half the Ph.D. scientists and engineers working in the U.S. were born abroad."

- Michael Greenstone, Director, The Hamilton Project at Brookings & Adam Looney

"Despite the ongoing jobs recession, American companies need more highly skilled workers. U.S. colleges are simply not graduating enough Americans trained in the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and math — to meet the needs of the nation's high-tech sector. Immigrants are necessary to fill the gap."

- Dan Griswold, Director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute

"Immigrants who come to the United States to study at our best universities and then go to work at our nation's leading companies contribute directly and immediately to our nation's global economic competitiveness."

- Marshall Fitz, Director of Immigration Policy, Center for American Progress

"Such investments in new businesses and in research may provide spillover benefits to U.S.-born workers by enhancing job creation and by increasing innovation among their U.S.-born peers."

- Edward Alden, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

"Consider a hardware company that cannot hire key engineers to design a new product because of the H-1B shortage. Those workers do not get a job; nor do the workers who would have manufactured the product; nor do those who would sell it."

- James Sherk, Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics, Heritage Foundation

© 2012. PARTNERSHIP FOR A NEW AMERICAN ECONOMY. PAID FOR BY NEW AMERICAN ECONOMY ACTION FUND, WHICH IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONTENT OF THIS MESSAGE. [SOURCES OF CANDIDATE QUOTES]