Friday, January 5, 2024: 9:10 AM
Franciscan C (Hilton Union Square)
Nivetha Karthikeyan, Yale University
The U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990 in response to forecasts that American corporations would face a shortage of over six hundred thousand scientists and engineers within two decades. With it, the U.S. constructed the H-1B visa program: a temporary, labor-based migration permit for workers in a “specialty occupation” defined by “theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.” The language of the act made no explicit reference to particular industries or migrants, but both the act and the H-1B visa quickly became synonymous with South Asian high-tech workers, who claimed to meet the law's requirement of “a body of highly specialized knowledge” by possessing “technical skill.” These migrants were not the first to make claims for access through declarations of technical ability. Decades earlier, certain Mexican agricultural workers migrating to the United States under the Bracero Program made their own claims of possessing "technical skill" (that necessary to operate farm machinery) in order to enter the country.
“Technical skill” thus emerged in American immigration as an extralegal category – one not explicitly written in federal policies, but instead referenced in congressional hearings, repeated by industry lobbyists, and evoked in migrants’ and immigrants’ descriptions of their own positions as laborers.
This article maps the crystallization of “technical skill” as category, tracing how classifications of the “technical” were imbricated by older classifications of the “skilled” and “unskilled” to produce new taxonomies of immigrant worth. Ultimately, the article offers the troubling conclusion that the Cold War-era immigration policies widely credited with the “opening up” of America instead carried the specter of earlier, explicitly racial categories of exclusion—masked and recoded through the language of technical expertise.
