The government has received enough applications for the controversial H1-B foreign worker visa program to fill its 2007 cap, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Thursday.
The U.S. government has received enough applications for the controversial H1-B foreign worker visa program to fill its 2007 cap, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Thursday.
May 26 was the last day the agency accepted applications for the program, used by many U.S. companies to fill tech-related jobs. Program advocates say it helps companies hire foreign workers with hard-to-find skills. Companies could first apply for 2007 H-1Bs on April 1.
One tech trade group said the early fill-up shows the need for more H-1Bs. The application cap comes earlier this year than last year, when the limit was reached in August, a month and a half before the 2006 fiscal year began.
“This is bad news as America keeps losing the race to other countries to attract the world’s best and the brightest high skilled workers,” Ralph Hellmann, senior vice president for government relations at the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), said in an e-mail. “This further underscores the need by Congress to provide additional incentives to attract these workers.”
A shortage of high-tech workers created by the cap “hurts the United States’ ability to innovate, compete and create new jobs,” added Ginny Terzano, Microsoft spokeswoman.
The government’s fiscal 2007 year begins Oct. 1, and the H-1B cap is set at 65,000 for the year. A comprehensive immigration bill that passed the Senate last week would raise the yearly limit to 115,000, but many Republicans in the House of Representatives are opposed to that bill for other reasons.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA (IEEE-USA), representing U.S. IT workers, has opposed a higher H-1B cap, saying the program is currently ripe for abuse. Many H-1B workers get paid significantly less than U.S. workers with similar jobs, hurting both groups, the IEEE-USA contends.
The government releases little timely data showing what kinds of foreign workers U.S. tech companies are hiring with H-1Bs, said Ron Hira, IEEE-USA’s vice president for career activities. Unless tech companies share their hiring practices, it’s hard to know if they use H-1Bs to hire workers making $8.50 an hour or $120,000 a year, Hira said.
“There’s no way to disentangle whether the demand is for cheaper labor, or whether the demand is for the geniuses they’re bringing in,” Hira said.
Under a bill passed by Congress in 2004, the first 20,000 H-1B applications for workers with master’s degrees or higher are exempt from the cap. As of Thursday, the immigration agency had received about 5,800 exempt applications, it said.
With about 14,000 exemption applications still available, that suggests that some companies are looking primarily for cheap labor, Hira said. “That’s at least one indication that there’s not just geniuses coming in,” he said.
