High-tech new citizens bemoan long path to ceremony

Twenty-one years after he set foot in the United States, Facebook engineer Wei Zhu was overjoyed to take his oath of citizenship Wednesday at a special Silicon Valley immigration summit.

But why, he asked, did becoming American have to take him two decades?

"The path for me to become a citizen was really too long. It really shouldn't have to be this long," said the 39-year-old Cupertino engineer, one of the brains behind the social network's Facebook Connect application.

But even as the nation's top immigration official praised the select group of accomplished immigrants in a ceremony at Moffett Field, many of the new citizens and others expressed candid frustration at the bureaucratic hurdles that can make it hard to settle in the United States.

One immigration lawyer stood up to describe the agency as incompetent. A prominent venture capitalist said the "lifeblood of Silicon Valley" is getting choked by immigration restrictions. A guest worker from India promised to leave if he didn't get a permanent visa soon.

"Just let me get on a visa," Yogesh Agarwal said during a question-and-answer session. If not, said the 29-year-old Sunnyvale resident whose H-1B work visa expires next year, "I will probably go back to my country and start a business there."

Summit host, U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Director Alejandro Mayorkas, replied that he was trying his best to smooth the path for skilled immigrants and the businesses that want to hire them.

With little chance that a divided Congress will pass new immigration laws, Mayorkas said he was trying to work within the system to make the immigration bureaucracy nimble enough to benefit the fast-changing tech and science fields.

Entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa, acknowledged at the ceremony with the agency's "Outstanding Americans by Choice" award, called the immigration system a "complete mess" that is draining the country of talent but said Mayorkas wasn't to blame.

"I'm his biggest fan," Wadhwa told the audience of more than 150 business people and attorneys. "He's doing whatever he can within his power to fix the system, but he's handicapped."

It was immigration law, more than its administration, that most needs fixing, he and others said.

Wei Zhu exemplified the frustrations. Born in a remote part of China, he came to the West Coast as a 17-year-old in 1991, immediately enrolling in college and delivering newspapers to help pay the bills. It took him about a decade to finally get his green card, but then, in a complicated twist, he gave it up so his fiancée could get hers.

"I was desperate, trying to figure a way so she could stay with me," he said. "I gave them my green card."

He spent many more years trying to get a new one, losing entrepreneurial opportunities because he had to stick with the big companies that sponsored his stay.

Mayorkas hosted the Wednesday summit to discuss better utilizing existing employment-based visas: B visas for business visitors, E-1 and E-2 visas for traders and investors from countries that have signed special treaties with the United States, L-1 visas for intracompany transfers, O-1 visas for workers with "extraordinary ability" and the best known and most controversial: H-1B visas for skilled workers in the technology field and other specialty occupations.

"Today is a very important step," said Mayorkas, who said he is launching a new initiative -- called Entrepreneurs in Residence -- to bring more tech expertise into a federal agency he acknowledged doesn't always fully grasp the high-tech landscape.

Echoing his approach was U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who helped conduct the morning ceremony granting citizenship to 21 tech workers.

"The Republicans have blocked reform, so we need to do what we can within the law," Lofgren said in an interview.

The summit reflected a crowd that overwhelmingly favors a more liberal immigration policy, especially for workers with demonstrated skills and advanced education. Some speakers noted the political reality that not all Americans share their preference for such an open immigration policy.

"This is a very political issue. We have to be cognizant of that," said venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, who tearfully described his own family's escape from Iran when he was a boy. "Part of that is going to be marketing and winning the hearts and minds of Americans."

Those who think the United States welcomes too many foreign workers have been rallying behind a Texas woman who challenged President Barack Obama during a nationwide Internet "hangout" on Jan. 30.

"My question to you is why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?" asked Jennifer Wedel, whose husband lost an engineering job three years ago at Texas Instruments.

Obama told her husband to send him his resume, and the president said, "I'll forward it to some of these companies that are telling me they can't find enough engineers in this field."