Debate over H-1B Visas hots up in U.S.
Pakistan Times Monitoring Desk

WASHINGTON (US): All 65,000 of next fiscal year’s H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers have been snapped up, the earliest that has ever happened amid conflicting calls for expanding the programme or reducing the number of visas offered drastically.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Service said on Friday it has received petitions for all of the fiscal 2006 H-1B visas that became valid Oct-1.

Last year, the cap for the visa programme, which is designed for foreigners with engineering, computer science and other technical specialties, was not hit until October.

Computer Engineers

Tracy Koon, director of corporate affairs for Intel of Santa Clara said it was seeking a number of highly educated computer engineers and others and could not find them in this country.

She said, “We don’t have enough US students going into these programmes, this is a competitiveness issue for us”.

A lot of other US companies are in the same boat, according to Harris Miller, president of the Virginia-based Information Technology Association of America.
“The H-1B visa programme is important to US competitiveness in high technology,” Miller said in a statement issued on Friday.

“We believe a significant increase is required to meet the need for specialized skills and keep companies and, as a result, jobs for US workers growing at a steady pace.”

But Ira Mehlman, a spokesman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform said it was wrong for US companies to be wooing foreigners when there were so many skilled US workers who have been laid off in recent years.

“Something is not right,” Mehlman said, “That’s not the way the system ought to work. Go find them, get them back, before you start looking all over the world for workers.”

The annual Limit

Congress has adjusted the annual limit on H-1B workers several times in recent years in conjunction with the rise and fall of the economy. It boosted the cap to 115,000 in 2,000 and 195,000 in 2001, but then dropped it to 65,000 in 2004.

Under a law enacted last year, an additional 20,000 H-1B visas can be used for foreign workers with master’s or higher degrees from US colleges and universities. So far, 8,000 of those H-1B visas have been allocated for the 2006 fiscal year.

The demand for scaling back the issuance of H-1B visas is being made not only by US organizations and individuals but also lawmakers. The H-1B visa programme has no serious safeguards to protect American workers from being replaced and was abused to provide cheap foreign labour said Tom Tancredo, a Congressman from Colorado.

The H-1B visa limits were set during prosperous economic times but now could not be justified when so many highly trained Americans remained unemployed, he said referring to the six per cent unemployed in the country.

Congress needed to increase domestic worker safeguards, significantly reduce the number of H-1B visas issued, and crackdown on visa violations and fraud, Tancredo said.

In the next 10 years, the US would be losing 800 IT jobs daily, due to offshore outsourcing, and the federal government’s H-1B and L-1 guest worker programmes would be decisive in this process, he said.●