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House panel approves hi-tech visa bill

Nitish S Rele

Kudos are in order for Lamar Smith, member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas. The chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee was instrumental in the passage of a bill on Wednesday, April 12, that will allow an unlimited number of H-1B visas to be issued over the next three years for hi-tech foreign workers.

H-1B visas are now annually capped at 115,000.

But critics contend that certain provisions of Smith's bill are unfair to technology companies. Specially targeted is the provision that companies employing foreign hi-tech workers should show that they have been successful in raising their US work force along with the salaries of American workers.

The Information Technology Association of America is critical of the provision that could condition the additional visas on the Department of Labour's release of immigration regulations implementing a law that was passed by Congress two years ago.

ITAA also feels that requiring employers seeking additional visas to meet new wage and hiring test conditions may prove counterproductive.

Instead, the association is throwing its weight behind a bi-partisan bill floating in the House that will raise the caps on H-1B visas over the next three years to 200,000, increase funding for technology training and K-12 education, and recapture the number of unused employment-based permanent visas that were lost due to delays by government agencies in fiscal 1999 and 2000.

There are few doubts that the U.S. will face a huge shortage of hi-tech workers in the next 12 months. Ironically, just a day before Smith's bill was passed, ITAA itself had released a survey forecasting a shortage of 850,000 IT professionals in the country over the next year.

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