Who is your immigrant and what do they do?

Immigration is A Big Deal. It's official. A divisive issue as little as a year ago, the 2012 election proved that both parties have a lot to gain by tackling the issue. As always, the devil is in the details- and there are a lot of details. One is the separate handling of highly skilled immigrants, but who are they? What do they do? Let's take a look at 2012's visa application figures and get some answers.

What do highly skilled immigrants do?

Employing a foreign worker is not a simple or fast process, so why do it? Well, there can be many reasons (and we'll examine one negative one shortly) but the main reason- and reason for the whole program being created- is to employ workers who simply don't exist in sufficient numbers within the US.

Every year, the US grants between 100,000 and 200,000 visas to these workers. They all have one thing in common- they have either a college education or "equivalent experience". That's the "highly skilled" part of the visa- and an overwhelming number of these highly skilled immigrants work in tech. To be more specific, computing- in 2012 there were more "Computing and Mathematical" visas given out than every other category put together.

That's not to say there aren't exceptions- some eight thousand workers arrived in 2012 to work in finance, while just over four thousand arrived to work in the health industry.

What's next?

Coming soon (i.e. when I finish this thing):

So, yeah. Check back sometime.

What?!

Right. Well, I have a terrible history of half-finished projects, so I decided that uploading my work and making it public would be the best motivator to actually finish the thing. So if you're reading this, and think that it is in any way interesting, furiously tweet at me until I complete it.