Securing Talent for CHIPS Act Success

This commentary piece is part of CNAS’s The Pitch: A Competition of New Ideas. The author, Connor O’Brien, won the Technology and National Security Heat at the 2024 competition.

The United States is currently engaged in a wide-ranging effort to reshore key parts of the semiconductor supply chain—a bipartisan national security priority. With the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, Congress has provided both generous subsidies and, more recently, regulatory relief for recipients of the act’s funding.¹ And yet comparatively little attention has been paid to talent and workforce constraints, which may ultimately determine whether the act succeeds or fails.

The U.S. chipmaking sector faces two challenges: scaling up quickly and building out the sector’s most advanced production lines domestically. Neither of these can be accomplished without rapidly upskilling and expanding the chipmaking workforce. Congress will need to consider further spending on domestic training programs beyond the down payment on such programs in the CHIPS and Science Act. But the urgency of the challenge of reshoring semiconductor production is hard to overstate—the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would cut off the world’s main source of advanced chips, looms large.

Scaling up domestic workforce pathways will be the main way the United States builds a world-leading semiconductor workforce in the long run. But the urgency of the problem—along with the fact that many CHIPS Act–funded facilities will come online long before any domestic training programs can scale—needs Congress to leverage immigration policy for reshoring production. Not doing so not only risks the failure of CHIPS Act projects but pushes away talent that could be used to build American chip manufacturing strength to adversaries instead. Congress should therefore create a narrowly tailored Chipmaker’s Visa.²

Estimates from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology suggest the CHIPS Act will directly boost demand for high-skilled workers in semiconductor manufacturing by 20 percent.³ If the act is to be successful—creating a self-sustaining ecosystem of unsubsidized factories—this increase is merely a lower bound. While estimates of so-called labor shortages deserve real scrutiny, to meet this immediate need, the United States needs better tools to retain skilled foreigners (who account for a majority of graduate students in fields relevant to semiconductors) and poach experienced talent from abroad.⁴ The Chipmaker’s Visa could do both.

Employers would be able to use a Chipmaker’s Visa to sponsor workers for jobs throughout the semiconductor supply chain, from experienced engineering managers lured from South Korean firms to coveted Dutch extreme ultraviolet lithography experts. Talent needs vary from one firm to another, so the visa should not be limited to narrow occupational categories. In contrast, the H-1B visa—the country’s signature skilled immigration option—limits workers to arbitrarily defined “specialty occupations” subject to change from one presidential administration to the next, and which must be directly related to their degree field. This means that someone with an advanced degree in mathematics risks being denied a visa for work on semiconductor design. The flexibility of the Chipmaker’s Visa would send a clear message to chip manufacturers investing in the United States over the next few years that even as domestic training programs are still maturing, talent will not be a bottleneck.

For those firms new to the United States who are making first-time greenfield investments, such a visa may ease the way for getting an initial, experienced team in place. For manufacturers with an established major presence in the United States, the Chipmaker’s Visa would give them a leg up when competing with international rivals for recruits, while making it easier to retain valuable employees.

Today’s skilled immigration system makes it far too difficult for chipmakers to attract and retain talent. The H-1B visa is capped at 85,000 new recipients per year in the private sector; as the number of applicants has skyrocketed to nearly half a million for fiscal year 2025, the odds of any particular applicant winning a visa have declined.⁵ If an American chip firm like Intel identifies a must-have engineer, the H-1B program is more likely to deny them a visa than grant them one.⁶

Meanwhile, for foreign-born employees already at semiconductor firms, the growing backlogs for employment-based green cards are becoming unbearable. Per-country green card caps mean Indian and Chinese nationals cannot be awarded more than 7 percent of employment-based green cards each per year; excess applicants must wait in line. As a result, some categories of Indian and Chinese nationals applying for employment-based permanent visas today will likely die still in line.⁷ For parents on H-1B visas, such long waits for green cards often mean that their children will lose legal status when they turn 21.⁸ To Chinese firms trying to poach talent for themselves, this is a gift courtesy of America’s dysfunctional skilled immigration system. Unsurprisingly, China in recent years has stepped up efforts to recruit chip talent trained abroad, offering bonuses of half a million dollars or more.⁹ If the United States cannot improve its high-skilled immigration pathways for chip manufacturing talent, it will lose key workers to China and other rivals.

The Chipmaker’s Visa should be narrowly tailored to the problem at hand and not undercut American workers. The visa should be limited to firms in industries directly related to semiconductor manufacturing, as defined by the Department of Commerce. While Congress remains divided on the optimal size and scope of the U.S. immigration system, a small program targeted to a bipartisan priority could avoid opening contentious, big-picture debates over the broader immigration system.

Further, a Chipmaker’s Visa should be designed to allow recipients to flexibly move from one employer in the sector to another. Labor market dynamism is a key driver of productivity growth, as skilled employees take their talents from failing firms to ascendant ones.¹⁰ This freedom to change employers also ensures visa holders will be paid market wages and compete fairly against American workers.

Visas could also be used to accelerate the training of native-born workers. Visas should be auctioned off by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to firms in the sector and the revenue used to train American workers. This would have two benefits. First, it would create a revenue stream to fund additional apprenticeships and scholarships beyond what was appropriated through the CHIPS Act. If the program auctions off 10,000 visas per year for an average price of $5,000—the amount one estimate suggested that H-1B visas would fetch if allocated via auction—it would raise $500 million over a decade.¹¹ That sum is more than twice the size of the CHIPS Act’s Workforce and Education Fund. Second, allocating visas through an auction prioritizes those firms who most urgently need to tap global labor markets.

In passing the CHIPS and Science Act, policymakers broke with a longstanding taboo against industrial policy because America’s overwhelming dependence on Taiwanese facilities for advanced chips was simply too great a strategic vulnerability. Taking this motivation seriously implies that policy should therefore not treat semiconductor manufacturing as just any other industry, but instead systematically seek out and dismantle barriers to its success domestically. Subsidies are just the first step.

If policymakers are serious about securing a foothold in globally competitive, leading-edge chip production for the United States as soon as possible, a skilled immigration program must be on the table. For the moment, the pool of workers and managers with relevant expertise to oversee these supply chains is globally dispersed. Over time, the CHIPS Act’s domestic investments in workforce development will pay off. But for CHIPS Act–funded projects, shovels are already in the dirt. America cannot wait years for training pipelines to mature. Congress must act now to equip the chip manufacturers making major investments in the United States with the talent they need, lest it risk undercutting the CHIPS Act before it even gets off the ground.

About the Author

Connor O’Brien is a research analyst at the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan D.C. think tank, where he focuses on immigration and innovation policy. He has written on these and other topics for outlets including Newsweek, National Review, American Affairs, and City Journal. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Rutgers University.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the coauthor of his original Chipmaker’s Visa proposal, Adam Ozimek, and the CNAS team for support throughout the 2024 Pitch process. He would also like to thank his fiancée Rachel for help preparing for the competition. This report was made possible with general support to CNAS.

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About the Pitch

CNAS began The Pitch: A Competition of New Ideas in 2020 to elevate emerging and diverse voices in national security. Students and early-career professionals from across a variety of sectors submit innovative policy ideas to meet new challenges in U.S. national security policy. Selected applicants pitch their ideas in front of a distinguished panel of judges and a live audience. The judges and audience select heat winners, the audience choice winner, and best in show. Competitors will also have their ideas featured in official CNAS products and social media.