6月18日VOA聽力：芝加哥移民工人數目削減
CHICAGO— For several years, human resourcesdirector Pete Tapaskar says it’s been a challengeto fill all the jobs at his suburban Chicago-basedtechnology company.
"Getting high skilled people is still a challenge."
To fill those highly skilled tech jobs, Tapaskar recruits from outside the United States. About 80percent of ProSoft’s workforce is from South Asia, and many, Tapaskar included, came toChicago on special work visas, known as "H1B's."
“There is a high demand for the H1B’s for those who have high tech skills, he said.
While the demand for those visas remains high, Tapaskar says many who get them are notchoosing Chicago as their top destination. "They choose to move in the south, specificallyTexas, and Atlanta, Georgia."
“What we are seeing right now is a substantially decreased total of international in-migration,”Elizabeth Schuh is principal policy analyst for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency forPlanning (CMAP), who studys Chicago's recent immgration trend. “Prior to the recession wewere between 50 and 60 thousand most years. Now, since 2010, we’ve been at about 23- to24-thousand international in-migration on a net basis.”
Schuh says that dramatic drop — as much as two-thirds some years — contributes toChicago’s overall stagnant population growth. Chicago is growing more slowly than othersimilar large cities, like Boston, Los Angeles and New York city.
“From 2005 to 2009 ... the Chicago region was 4th in the country in terms of its rank for justthe raw number of immigrants it attracted,” Schuh explained. “And for the same number ofyears from 2009 to 2014, the Chicago region was 8th. So just adding even across all of thoseyears, you are seeing a substantial drop.”
Tapaskar says there are many reasons why immigrants choose to live Southern states insteadof Chicago.“The environment there is ideal for starting a business, could be the taxes arelower, and employers are getting a lot of benefits from the state government.”
But Tapaskar says one thing that could reverse that could bring new immigrants to Chicago, isincreasing the number of work visas that would attract more of the highly-skilled tech workershis business needs.
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