The H-1B visa, which allows U.S. companies to hire foreign professionals on a temporary basis for up to six years, is arbitrarily capped at 65,000 per year. This will result in critical projects being postponed, workers being laid off, and profits forfeited. U.S. companies in every field will be affected. A Senate bill would lift the cap to approximately 90,000 visas or more for the next five years. But controversy swirling around the legislation could spell its doom.
Immigration is always a controversial subject.
Even when the competitiveness of the American economy is at stake, proponents of immigration are viewed with suspicion and distrust. For the past several years, these groups and regional high-tech alliances have reported that the industry has hundreds of thousands of unfilled positions available. Many companies have turned to H-1B employees to fill the gap. But now that these same companies are asking for the H-1B cap to be raised in order to help fill this demand, suddenly the labor shortage itself is being challenged. Although every metropolitan area newspaper boasts pages and pages of high-tech help wanted ads each week, the General Accounting Office has challenged the methodologies that ITAA and the Commerce Department used to quantify the shortage.