By Joe Guzzardi, Project for Immigration Reform

Within less than 72-hours, President Joe Biden bailed out the Silicon Valley Bank and the equally insolvent Signature Bank. The banks’ abrupt failures caused a withdrawal rush on other banks across the nation that Social Science Research Network analysts fear could force nearly 200 depositories to shut their doors. Even insured depositors – those with $250,000 or less in the bank – could have problems withdrawing their cash if these institutions faced the same run-on cash that Silicon Valley experienced a week ago.

The hastily contrived plan included providing SVB’s depositors with access to all their funds, effectively averting painful financial uncertainty and the threat of heavy losses for thousands of venture-backed startups. Signature Bank, which had followed SVB into insolvency, received the same guarantee.

More important, the Federal Reserve will provide a massive lifeline to the nation’s banks that would assure that similarly reckless lenders have access to funds that would keep them afloat and, hopefully, subdue any growing nationwide panic. Biden has since called for Congress to impose stiff penalties on executives at mid-sized banks whose ineptitude leads to bank collapse.

In short, the administration’s bailout plan handed SVB a blank check to cover all its depositors who not coincidentally are mainly Bay Area venture capitalists, Biden’s donor and voter base. All accounts are now covered with FDIC insurance, even those above the $250,000 limit. S&P Global, which provides intelligence and assessments to worldwide corporations, found that tech companies had $151.6 billion in uninsured deposits at SVB, or 93.9 percent of the company’s total holdings.

The SVB fallout has been headlines since Day One; the story is evolving. But, behind the scenes, the Biden administration is working feverishly to grant more favors to his tech pals. The tech industry, led by Lyft, Meta, Twitter and Amazon, has fired at least 150,000 workers. Among those laid off were foreign workers in the U.S. on temporary H-1B visas. The visa allows for a grace period of up to 60 days for those laid off to find another employer sponsor or they must return home. Before coming to the U.S., each H-1B visa employee knew and agreed to the guidelines which included the possibility that, if laid off and unable to find another job, they would have to leave.

Suddenly, however, the H-1B visa’s reasonable conditions are unfair and unacceptable. Led by Biden’s 25-member Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, lobbying to extend the job search period from 60 to 180 days has intensified. The Immigration and Citizenship Status Subcommittee’s final recommendations included not only extending the 60-day time allotment, but also granting the foreign nationals employment authorization documents (EAD), and travel permits to those who have approved I-40 employment documents in the E-1, E-2 and E-3 categories, and have waited in the immigrant visa backlog for five years, regardless of whether they’re able to file for adjustment of status applications.

To have meaning, immigration laws must be adhered to, enforced and not changed to satisfy the whims of special interests. Distributing EADs, mostly to Indians, before green cards become available would incentivize more foreign nationals to flood the immigration sponsorship program and increase the years-long backlog.

The tech layoff – with more to come – should provide employment opportunities for U.S. workers, displaced or denied opportunities for more than three decades since Congress created the H-1B visa in the Immigration Act of 1990. Instead, U.S. tech jobseekers will have to compete with the recent 85,000 H-1B visa winners in the just-completed 2023 lottery, and the recipients of the administration’s pending green card giveaway largess.

Consistent with its open border policy that puts migrants first, the Biden administration ignores U.S. tech workers’ needs and protects legally deportable aliens even though settled immigration law calls for their removal.

Big tech’s insistence that it needs an ever-higher H-1B total has always been suspect. But this year, with massive industry layoffs, the lottery should have been canceled. Furthermore, circumventing immigration laws to create more loopholes for fired H-1Bs, as the expansion lobby is doing, is indefensible.

ABOUT JOE GUZZARDI

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Project for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania.

By Andrei Iancu and David Kappos

Chinese President Xi Jinping is putting his money where his mouth is.

“We must regard science and technology as our primary productive force,” he recently said. He’s already raised his country’s research and development spending to unprecedented levels. Now, he’s filling the highest reaches of government with experts in such areas as artificial intelligence, biotech, and semiconductors.

The United States needs to take this challenge seriously. Many in Washington appear to. The Chips and Science Act, passed in August, directs $200 billion over the next few years into basic research in cutting-edge fields like artificial intelligence and robotics.

But bankrolling basic research alone won’t lead to more innovation down the line. We also need robust intellectual property protections, without which new inventions wither away after the initial discovery for lack of further investment.

The last several decades have taught us that money isn’t everything. For example, the United States now spends about 3% of gross domestic product on R&D annually — a higher proportion than it spent at the height of the Space Race in the early 1960s. And yet, total factor productivity — the best measure of how much value innovation adds to the economy — has shrunk to an annual growth rate of just 0.5%, compared to 1% back then.

In other words, Americans used to get more for less.

This recent lackluster performance is a byproduct of ongoing assaults on IP law, which send a discouraging message to the companies and funds that invest in technology. Consider, for example, a proposal at the World Trade Organization to waive international patent protections on Covid therapeutics and diagnostic tools — most of which have applications far beyond one disease. This would amount to a hand-out of historic proportions to our biggest economic competitors.

The waiver is unnecessary on its own terms in a world where Covid tests and treatments are already in abundant supply. Plus, it would deal a devastating economic blow to the United States, undermine the development of new medicines, and set a precedent that invites even more attacks on IP rights. Other countries could insist on a “right” to U.S. patented technology in areas ranging from renewable energy to agriculture and beyond.

Another case in point: Dozens of members of Congress are urging the Administration to twist the law so that the federal government can seize patents whenever it has contributed so much as a cent to R&D.

It takes an enormous investment to move research from the laboratory to the marketplace, and we can be sure companies would stop funding product development if the government could simply nullify patent rights based on political whim. Kill patents and you kill private investment in innovation.

How can the United States keep its place as the world leader in scientific innovation? For a start, by resisting calls to tamper with patent rights. There is no surer way to cede technological leadership to China.

Andrei Iancu served as the undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from 2018 to 2021, under former President Donald Trump. David Kappos served as the undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office from 2009 to 2013, under former President Barack Obama. Both serve as board co-chairs of the Council for Innovation Promotion.

Bayh-Dole Act results. Source: Speedsprint.com

Bayh-Dole Act for intellectual property licensing designed to stimulate economic growth under attack

By Lita Nelsen

Lita Nelson. Source: LinkedIn

When I was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decades ago, Cambridge’s Kendall Square was a grubby, run-down warehouse district. Today, it’s known as the most innovative square mile on the planet.

The secret? The Bayh-Dole Act, or Trademark Law Amendments Act, a landmark piece of legislation passed in 1980 that allowed universities to keep the patents to any inventions they made. That meant that they could license these inventions to private companies, who would turn the new scientific knowledge into innovative products.

That one forward-looking law attracted hundreds of biotechnology companies to MIT’s backyard, helping to breathe new life into Kendall Square and revitalize Massachusetts’s economy. Cambridge, Mass., of course, wasn’t the only university community to thrive because of Bayh-Dole. Cities and towns surrounding hundreds of universities have prospered as a result.

Nevertheless, Bayh-Dole has recently come under attack by lawmakers who want to use the law as a mechanism to cut drug prices. Their goal of lowering drug prices for patients is admirable — but twisting the Bayh-Dole Act to use it as a price control tool would have disastrous consequences for America’s research universities, as well as U.S. consumers and patients, who will suffer as a result of any reduced investment in life sciences.

In a recent letter in support of this idea, lawmakers urged administrators at the Department of Health and Human Services to use Bayh-Dole to “march-in” and take away drug companies’ licenses to certain patents that stemmed from taxpayer-funded research. HHS could then relicense those drug patents to generic pharmaceutical companies that could create cheaper versions of the medicines.

That’s certain to make biotech investors and companies less willing to invest in university research. Why would any firm — small companies and startups especially — assume the risk of developing a new drug when the government could seize its patent rights if federal officials don’t like the price of the final product?

Lawmakers would do well to remember that Bayh-Dole fundamentally changed the research and development landscape in the United States for the better.

I should know. As the head of MIT’s Technology Licensing Office for almost three decades, I helped license thousands of technologies to the innovative companies that sprung up around campus.

Before Bayh-Dole, the government retained patent rights to any academic discoveries supported by public money and licensed just 5% of the nearly 30,000 patents it held. Consequently, while this pre-Bayh-Dole system worked to advance basic research, it failed to turn scientific advancement into usable, commercial products.

Bayh-Dole shifted that paradigm, providing a mechanism to translate academic research results into new technologies ranging from high-definition television and the page-rank algorithm that would become Google to FluMist® and CAR T-cell therapy. Companies exploiting Bayh-Dole inventions have contributed up to $1.9 trillion to the U.S. gross industrial output and up to $1 trillion to our GDP. They have supported nearly 6.5 million jobs and led to the creation of over 15,000 startups.

The bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act, as its authors clearly stated, was never meant to be a price-control mechanism. The law outlines four clearly defined instances where its march-in provisions can be exercised. Controlling prices is not one of them.

What today’s lawmakers don’t seem to grasp is that the unintended consequences of meddling with Bayh-Dole will outweigh any wished-for benefits.

Lita Nelsen retired from the Technology Licensing Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after 30 years in the office. She was director of MIT TLO from 1992 to 2016. This op-ed originally ran in the Boston Herald.