Employers Fill 2006 High-Tech Visa Quotas

[AlphaCentauri]

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201379.html

[wli]

1. more border closings... something's going down folks

No idea what it is yet.

[AlphaCentauri]

3. more outsourcing and less jobs for the middle class /nt

[wli]

4. I'm not quite so hopeful.

[high density]

2. Poor Bill Gates

How is he ever going to run a company without more H1-Bs available? Oh it's just so sad!!

[FloridaPat]

5. Problem is, these people stay here after their job is over and then

move on to the next job. When they're done, they're suppose to go back home, but no one is enforcing that. Then if there here for a certain period, they get their green cards. Meanwhile, I've been out of work for 8 months and there are others on this board who have been out of work longer.

[ramapo]

6. Guaranteed employment

A condition of the H1 visa is that the holder is sponsered by a company. That company promises the holder employment. Then they get their green card. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are out of work because of the H1B fiasco.

[DS1]

7. I wish they'd deny them all

but that's just me

[FloridaPat]

8. Same here but I am prejudiced on this subject. I know too many US

citizens out of work while our government keeps shipping programmer jobs overseas and bringing in people from out of the country to take what jobs are left here.

I talked to a head hunter this week. He said IBM replaced all their US citizens in one area with people straight from India. Glad I don't own an IBM ocmputer.

[Moderator]

9. kick

[lovuian]

10. U.S. out of visas for high-tech workers

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3308716

.S. out of visas for high-tech workers
Limit of 65,000 permits is reached in record time
By JENNIFER A. DLOUHY
Copyright 2005 Hearst News Service

WASHINGTON - The federal government on Friday hit its cap on the number of foreign, highly skilled workers allowed in the country on H-1B visas next fiscal year, setting a record for reaching the limit so early.

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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service announced it had run out of 65,000 of the visas nearly two months before they are valid, on Oct. 1. This is the earliest the government has hit its cap on the H-1B visas, which are reserved for foreigners in specialty occupations, such as engineering, computer science and medicine.

The announcement spurred new calls for Congress to boost the annual limit on H-1B visas. Businesses — mostly high-tech firms — that championed expansions of the visa program in the 1990s argue they need more freedom to fill highly specialized jobs with foreign workers.

Angelo Amador, director of immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said companies must rely on foreign employees because of the nation's low unemployment rate and a shortage in specialized workers domestically.

"There's a shortage of these kind of workers with special degrees and special education in the work force," Amador said, adding that U.S. employers need to look outside the nation's borders "to fill that gap."

But critics — including unions and opponents of expanding immigration — argue that companies exploit the H-1B visa program to hire foreigners at cheaper salaries than they would pay to domestic workers. And they are skeptical of claims that there are not enough U.S. engineers and computer specialists to go around.

more...

With War drums beating by Iran and China and India in the middle of everybody!!! They want these guys doing software for our country!!!

This is insanity!!! Not excluding this is only to keep US tech workers salaries lower!!! It will past no doubt about it!!!

[Robert Oak]

11. Just such a lie

They are gearing up the propaganda machine in order to get massive increases of cheap labor into the US for labor arbitrage. They are trying a two fold strategy (for insourcing as well as using this lie to offshore outsource):
one through congress and the other to move high tech worker Visas to UNLIMITED
amounts and through the WTO. That would mean the US would have no say in the matter.

This is a blatant lie. They cannot find 22-25 year old high tech workers who will work for nothing and work 100 hours a week.

If you're over 40 they will deny the job outright. To this day we see posts wanting extreme skills from Indians living here but the job demands they return to India after 2 months, of course at much lower wages. There are many jobs are not even offered to Americans or posted to Americans.

There is a high unemployment rate in engineering still, so this is an absolute BOLD FACED LIE by BLS statistics!

Moral is at an all time low, students are not studying high tech due to this sort of treatment and of course corporations still want to treat engineering worse than the treatment one gets working at Burger King.

[girl gone mad]

14. Just an observation, purely anecdotal:

I ate dinner last night at an Indian restaurant that I've been going to for many years now.

Aside from my family, all of the other diners were Indian or Indian-American. Over the years, I've noticed that the Indian people living here seem to have moved into the upper-middle class. On the whole, they dress in more designer clothing, drive more expensive cars, wear more bling and live in nicer neighborhoods than they did less than a decade ago.

This sea change might have implications for Indian workers coming here on visas. Maybe it will get harder for companies to hire Indians at lower wages. Increasingly, US corporations are having to compete against newly founded Indian companies for the top talent, and because of our political climate, many more Indians are choosing to work or go to school in Europe or Australia instead of coming here.

[Robert Oak]

15. Indians are the richest minority group, true

The Indians have used education and the VISA system as a comparative advantage,but I also believe India gives financial support to study abroad which puts Americans at an extreme disadvantage without the same financial support as foreigners in US universities.

One must also realize that before the abuses of VISAs began (starting in the 90's), if an Indian got to the US to study or work (before the use of Visas for labor arbitrage) odds are they were extremely talented. (and they were paid the same as any American and so on).

I don't have a study but it used to be the US education system was the vehicle for immigrants to succeed (lawyer, Doctor, go to college and so on)...but how our educational system sucks and college doesn't suck in terms of education it's now becoming impossible to afford, so Indians can get their social mobility through education in their home country, then reap the rewards in 1st world economies.

BTW: India Indians are also huge political contributors to US congress and there are many "citizens" out there helping their country of origin through our congress.

Finally: You might just be near a high tech zone where some Indians went off and did a start up and hit it big or something. :)

[cascadiance]

18. The Big problem with H-1B visas in the 90's were contracting agencies...

that *only* hired them and no other "permanent" workers. They would be an agency filled with H-1B workers and would sell their work to other big companies such as HP and Sun as a "service" to them, rather than as providing them with "contract workers". This was to use a loophole that allowed companies to work around the restriction that the H-1B Visa program had that kept companies like HP or Sun from hiring/sponsoring H-1B VISA employees directly at lower salaries than their permanent workers (U.S. citizens or those with regular green cards) were being paid. The hiring company in these instances was the contracting agencies, and without any permanent employee peers in their employ, there was no basis for keeping their salaries equivalent to U.S. workers' salaries, and they could pay them whatever they wanted.

This scam has been going on for YEARS. I've seen this being discussed and symptoms of it happening myself 10 or so years ago in companies I was working for in a number of different contexts. It's too bad that companies aren't using H-1B program for what it was intended to be used, for the few cases where we might need to go outside our country to obtain talent we can't get here (unique expertise, etc.) where our companies would truely be willing to pay market price for foreign engineers to be allowed here to give our companies important expertise needed for certain products/services we couldn't otherwise get. Instead, this abuse is screwing our workforce more, and now is handicapping companies here who might truely want to use what the program was intended for, with the cap already being filled at this point. That really sucks for both honest American employees and honest American companies!

[bluedonkey]

12. That is unbelievable!

I guess it's true,the inmates running the asylum.
Why does * hate Amerika?

[anotherdrew]

13. maybe they need to identify talent and train people, like always before...

Since when did 'staff development' become an unacceptable expense?

[TomClash]

16. Here's a flash to everyone in Corporate America who can read

The unions and opponents of expanded immmigration are right.

[OKthatsIT]

17. tsk tsk...guess they'll have to hire an American worker