Thread: Foreign-born grads stymied by work visas quota

Foreign-born grads stymied by work visas quota
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff | April 27, 2007

Kuanysh Batyrbekov, 22, will soon graduate from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in economics, and he has lined up a job with the prominent investment bank Lehman Brothers . But he won't be spending much time on Wall Street.

Batyrbekov is a citizen of Kazakhstan , and his student visa will expire 10 months after his June graduation. Lehman Brothers plans to keep him, but will be forced to move Batyrbekov to one of its overseas offices.

"I'll probably end up in London because I can't get a visa," he said. "There's no way I can stay here."

Batyrbekov has plenty of company in a year when all available work visas were claimed in record time. Every year, thousands of foreign-born college students graduate from US schools after acquiring valuable training and skills. But often these graduates can't take jobs with American firms that would gladly hire them because of limits on the number of work visas. Compounding the problem is the fact that for eign students must graduate before applying: This year's visa quota was filled in early April, long before the new crop of seniors could apply.

"Our strategy is to hire the best from the US colleges, and many of the foreign nationals have better records," said Joe Javorski, director of recruiting at Analog Devices Inc., an electronics component maker in Norwood. But Javorski said his company has been unable to hire many graduates it would like to employ because the competition for visas is too steep. "It is getting more and more difficult to get people visas without a tremendous amount of work, cost, and associated risk," he said.

The H-1B temporary category, run by the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, was established in 1990 to admit skilled foreign workers. It is the most likely way for a foreigner to get permission to work in the US for a limited time. But intense demand for foreign workers, mostly in high-tech industries, has overwhelmed the program, which is limited to 65,000 visas per year. This year, the service began accepting applications on April 1. By April 2, the quota was filled. A separate program for people with master's and doctoral degrees provides an additional 20,000 visas. There are fewer applicants for these visas, but a spokesman said this quota is nearly full as well.

The H-1B visas, which are good for three years and may be renewed once, must be applied for by US-based firms seeking to hire foreigners. The agency said it doesn't have a breakdown on which companies have applied for the visas. But critics of the H-1B program say that major technology services companies, many based in India, apply for thousands of visas through their US subsidiaries, effectively securing jobs for foreign workers in the United States that would otherwise go to Americans.

"Unfortunately, the program has been pretty much hijacked by these technology services companies that are using it to take the business from American workers," said Jessica Vaughan, senior policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, a lobbying group that favors tighter limits on immigration. Vaughan opposes an increase in the number of H-1B visas sought by several business groups, but acknowledges that the current system puts foreign-born students at a disadvantage in applying for the program. "I wish it was not completely swamped by what I consider to be the illegitimate use of the program," she said.

This year, immigration officials got 133,000 applications before cutting off the inquiries. After applications are vetted, a computer randomly selects which ones will be awarded visas. In past years, virtually all of the approved visas went to workers with a college education. And initial visas approved for workers coming from abroad have lagged behind those awarded to foreign workers already in the United States.

Officials at several technology services companies, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro Ltd., and Infosys Technologies Ltd., who were asked to comment on the debate over the H-1B program did not respond.

Federal regulations require that H-1B applicants have at least a bachelor's degree. But most students are awarded their degrees in May or June. This wasn't a problem until recently, because it took months for the government agency to collect enough applications to fill the H-1B quota. The slump in the global technology market early in the decade led to a slowdown in hiring. As a result, the quota was reduced in 2003 from 195,000 visas to the current 65,000. But as recently as 2004, it took six months to fill the quota.

But the tech industry is surging once again. Last week, the American Electronics Association reported that US electronics, computer, and software firms hired 146,000 workers in 2006, making it the best year since the boom of the late 1990s. Companies throughout the industry are warning that America isn't producing enough scientists and engineers to meet their needs, and are lobbying Congress for an increase in the number of H-1B visas. A bill to increase the H-1B cap to 115,000 was introduced in Congress earlier this month.

"In our view, the cap needs to go up by a considerable amount," said Jim Klocke, executive vice president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. "We're hopeful that there can be some movement this year."

In the meantime, technology companies are gobbling up about half of the H-1B visas, according to immigration service spokesman Christopher Bentley. However, the program is open to skilled foreign workers in every field. "You'll see everything on the list from fashion models to accountants to theologians," Bentley said.

Jon Stona will graduate from Harvard this year with a degree in sociology. The giant Internet company Google Inc. has hired him, not to program computers but to study consumer behavior in the company's marketing department. But Stona will probably have to spend part of his Google career at one of the company's overseas offices.

"I was hoping to get an H-1B visa, but we have to graduate first," said Stona. That means waiting till June, two months after all the visas were gone. Stona never had a chance. "I couldn't even apply," he said.

Rebecca Gong, a Harvard junior and president of the school's Woodbridge Society of Inter national Students, is lobbying for a change in Harvard's school year, which ends about two weeks later than that of other leading universities. "Because we're so behind other university schedules, our students are at a disadvantage to other students in applying for visas," Gong said.

In a referendum held earlier this month, Harvard students overwhelmingly backed an earlier end to the school year. But Gong acknowledges that a change in the Harvard calendar would help international graduates land H-1B visas only if it were combined with a big increase in the current quota.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/hi ... ta/?page=1

What kind of idiot majors in Economics? If he wants to be in demand he needs to major in something that we need here, engineers, scientists, mathematicians. We've got plenty of native born people to be economists.
I thought that was the whole point of allowing student visas here to begin with , as a way to bring in smart and talented young people who would be able to fill those roles.