(Image source from: The Mercury News)

According to the new opinion poll, Bay Area residents stand apart from the nation in their affirmative views toward the H-1B visa for highly skilled foreign workers.

While 44 percent of the United States voters believe H-1B workers take jobs from Americans, merely 23 percent of Bay Area residents hold the positive view toward H-1B visa.

The survey was conducted for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group the Mercury News organization.

Nearly, four among 10 Bay Area residents said H-1B workers lend critical skills that companies cannot find at home. About 30 percent of voters surveys nationally earlier this year by Politico held that view.
                                    Source: The Mercury News
"Tech companies in the valley cannot fill the job openings," said Craig Christensen, of Palo Alto, a retired software engineer, and family law mediator. If qualified foreign workers can't get work visas, he said, their skills get turned against American industry.

"The cream of the crop from other countries come here, to go to the cream of the crop of our universities, and we don’t let them stay here," said Christensen, who considers himself an independent. "We force them against their will to go back to their home countries to compete against us. Idiotic."

The opinion poll comparatively found midget hostility toward foreign workers locally as more than seven out of 10 Bay Area residents believe H-1B workers have a positive outcome on the region's quality of life and economy whereas half of the residents said H-1B visa workers had a positive impact on the economy and merely 4 percent said they had an identical negative impact.

In whole, residents of Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties were more likely to believe H-1B workers were taking jobs from Americans than those in other counties. The both counties than San Mateo, San Francisco and Alameda counties traditionally have had more registered Republicans.

It is found that Republicans have more antagonistic views toward H-1B visa-holders than Democrats or no-party-preference voters.

Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino said even though Bay Area residents have positive attitudes about H-1B workers, he doesn’t see a disconnect in the poll’s findings that voters largely favor keeping the number of visas the same. He thinks Bay Area residents would prefer to invest education and increase the domestic talent pool for highly skilled tech jobs.

By Sowmya Sangam