Thread: Employers Fill 2006 High-Tech Visa Quotas

www.washingtonpost.com

Employers Fill 2006 High-Tech Visa Quotas

The Associated Press
Friday, August 12, 2005; 6:56 PM

WASHINGTON -- Immigration officials said Friday they are no longer accepting applications for H1-B visas for high-tech and specialty workers because they have enough to meet the 2006 quota.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, received enough applications by Wednesday to meet the quota, agency said. The cutoff of applications comes a little more than a month earlier than last year.


Federal law provides 65,000 H1-B visas every fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. Of those, 6,800 are set aside for workers from Chile and Singapore under terms of U.S. trade agreements with those countries.

The visas are granted to foreigners in specialty professions such as scientists, engineers and computer programmers. H1-B visas are good for up to six years. Under the program, employers must pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over.

The visas are controversial. High-tech and other employers say too few such visas are available and more are needed, but groups representing labor unions and high-tech workers say Americans are being replaced by foreign workers who work for less money.

Visas are still available for some of the additional 20,000 H1-B visas Congress provided for foreigners with a U.S.-earned master's degree or higher U.S. degree. Foreigners who work at higher education institutions or a nonprofit or government research organization on H1-B visas are not counted in the annual cap. The agency still is accepting applications in those categories.

www.computerworld.com
Update: H-1B visa cap reached; IT groups may press for more
They aren’t sure how many more visas they’d like to see
News Story by Patrick Thibodeau

AUGUST 12, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - WASHINGTON -- High-tech trade groups will likely push Congress to increase the H-1B visa cap following today’s announcement by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) that it has already reached the 65,000 H-1B cap for the 2006 fiscal year -– the earliest point ever at which the cap has been used up (download PDF).
Reaching the H-1B cap means that employers who need H-1B visas for workers may have to wait more than year before they can receive any additional visas under the program.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult for the best talent in the world to come to the U.S.,� said John Palafoutas, vice president of the tech industry group AEA in Washington, who said IT industry groups have been meeting with congressional leaders “to figure out what’s the best way to proceed on the issue.�

Palafoutas said it’s possible that a “market-based� solution could be crafted that would include automatic triggers to increase the cap if there is a strong demand for H-1B visas.

H-1B visas are used to bring skilled workers into the U.S. in a variety of occupations, and are heavily used by high-tech companies.

The industry groups aren’t saying how much of an increase in the visa limit they may seek this year, but Bob Cohen, spokesman for the Information Technology Association of America in Arlington, Va., said, “It should be significant.�

“I think it’s a real problem, and the longer we put off addressing it the less competitive we will be,� Cohen said of the cap.

This is the earliest the H-1B visa program has hit the cap prior to the start of the new fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, according to Christopher S. Bentley, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

The U.S. set a cut-off date of Aug. 10, and federal officials will use a computer to randomly select the applications that arrived on that day until the cap allotment is met, said Bentley.

Employers are not completely out of options. Congress increased the cap by 20,000 late last year but limited those visas to foreign graduates of U.S. universities with advanced degrees. As of early this month, 10,379 visas had been applied for under this program, said Bentley.

Vic Goel, an immigration attorney in Greenbelt, Md., said the cap’s quick exhaustion is a sign that the economy is doing well, and “obviously, should be taken as a sign that we don’t have enough visas.�

Goel said it means that employers will be “shut out� from getting additional visas for the next 14 months, until the start of the 2007 federal fiscal year.

One critic of the H-1B program, Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and vice president for career activities at the IEEE-USA, questioned claims that reaching the cap so soon is an indication of need.

Hira said the 2006 visa limit was hit before companies have even hired new workers -- and they can’t use the visas until the start of the new fiscal year. “It seems to indicate that companies are planning ahead for positions that don’t exist right now, which highlights the fact, contrary to conventional wisdom, that they are searching for Americans first,� Hira said.

Moreover, if U.S. companies were indeed in need of highly skilled foreign workers, the 20,000 visas available for graduate students at U.S. universities should have been used up quickly, said Hira. “If they were hiring the best and brightest, that would be the first category to go.�

Until two years ago, the cap had been set at 195,000. Opponents argue that the H-1B visas are used to facilitate offshoring of IT jobs, as well hold down tech wages. Businesses say that because so many U.S. graduates are foreigners, the visas are needed to hire workers with the right skills.

The 65,000 cap is actually 58,200 because 6,800 of the total number of visas have been set aside for workers of Singapore and Chile under trade agreements.



http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ne ... 384742.htm


Posted on Mon, Aug. 15, 2005


IMMIGRATION
Limit for work visa applications is reached in record time
U.S. work visa applications for foreign professionals reached the mandated limit, prompting calls for higher quotas from immigrant advocates.
BY ROBERT L. STEINBACK
rsteinback@herald.com

Fiscal year 2006 is still six weeks away, but the U.S. government has already received more than enough visa applications from foreign professionals seeking high-tech jobs in this country to meet the quota Congress set for next year, so no more applications are being accepted.

Any application for the skilled-work visas -- known as H-1Bs -- that didn't arrive by Aug. 10 will be rejected, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Friday.

Pro-immigration groups -- including immigration lawyers and businesses that rely on skilled foreign workers -- assailed the quick closure of the application process as proof the cap is unrealistically low in relation to demand.

''This is bad news for U.S. companies who now will have to cancel key job-creating projects or move the projects offshore to round out critical skill needs,'' said Deborah J. Notkin, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, in a prepared statement. ``This is a clear sign that the H-1B cap allotment needs to be better aligned with reality.''

DISAGREEMENTS

Compete America -- a coalition of corporations, universities, research institutions and trade groups -- said in a commentary on its website that early closure of the application process shows the U.S. demand for highly educated foreign professionals is accelerating.

However, not all experts agree that the rapid booking of available H-1B applications is clear-cut evidence of an excess of demand over supply.

''Unless the rules have changed since I last looked at the H-1B program, any applicant can apply for bulk numbers of H-1B visas,'' said an e-mail from Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, who specializes in immigration trends.

Teitelbaum added that many industry specialists have advised clients to apply for H-1B visas even if they're not sure they will be needed, to avoid being closed out later. Though Teitelbaum said he had not yet analyzed the latest supporting data, he has seen indications in recent years of notable levels of unemployment in certain high-tech sectors since the industry downturn in 2001.

Congress has set the annual H-1B cap at 65,000, a sharp decline from 195,000 annually in 2003. Of those, 6,800 visas are reserved for applicants from Chile and Singapore under free-trade agreements with those countries.

RECORD TIME

This is the second straight year in which all the available H-1Bs visas were applied for in record time. Last year, federal immigration officials closed the fiscal-year 2005 H-1B application window just hours after it opened Oct. 1.

In an attempt to cope with the visa demand for the current year, Congress in 2004 provided for 20,000 additional H-1B visas for foreign applicants possessing master's or higher degrees earned in the United States.

That exemption remains available for 2006. Other exemptions from the cap exist for foreign workers employed by universities, or certain nonprofit and government organizations. Applications for such exempted categories will still be accepted, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported.