How a proposed easing of federal immigration policy could help one Nashville tech company

The Federal Department of Labor is considering an expansion of its Schedule A program. This would make it easier for science and technology companies, including some in Middle Tennessee, to sponsor immigrant employees for permanent residency in the U.S.

One local company that could benefit from this decision is Quanta Computer Nashville. It’s a multinational company that does cloud computing for Fortune 500 corporations like Google. The Nashville office employs over 1,200 people and is the company’s only U.S. presence outside of California.

Stacey Jones, the Nashville recruiting manager for Quanta, said her company needs employees with specialized skills that are hard to come by outside of Silicon Valley.

“To get the talent that we need for test engineering, quality engineering, process engineering, automation, and so forth in the hardware manufacturing space is what is very hard to come by,” she said.

In the South, many of the right candidates for those roles happen to be immigrants who went to college in the U.S. But to sponsor one of these immigrants for permanent residency, companies currently have to conduct a market test – a report to the government proving a lack of qualified American citizens or current permanent residents who are available for the job. It can take over a year for the federal government to approve these tests, and companies need one for almost every immigrant they sponsor.

That slows things down for tech companies like Quanta, which are growing exponentially.

“(At) any given point, I’ll have between 15 to 30 open-salary job requisitions. Right now, I’ve got 23,” Jones said.

Schedule A allows companies in certain fields to sponsor immigrants for permanent residency without a market test — right now, that’s mostly healthcare workers. The Schedule A expansion the Department of Labor is considering would do away with market tests for many other jobs in tech and other science fields.

Jones says the highly diverse team at Quanta Computer Nashville makes the company, and the broader community, stronger.

“We have people here from dozens of countries. There’s over 12 languages spoken,” she said. “That’s part of what makes America so great is that there’s cultures that come in and they build upon each other.”

Jones sent a memo to the Department of Labor in favor of the Schedule A expansion. She hopes other businesses with similar needs will do the same.

Companies that want to send comments can do so here.

Update: This story was updated to include a link to the Department of Labor’s comment form.