The House version of the bill contains several highly onerous provisions that will require employers to be able to demonstrate that they have attempted to recruit for the positions and that they have not been laying off US workers. And, regretably, President Clinton has indicated that he will veto any legislation that does not contain the so-called worker protection provisions. Consequently, progress on the legislation has stalled while Congress works behind the scenes to resolve the differences. The push for these new worker protection provisions makes little sense given the fact that the US has one of the tightest labor markets in its history right now and companies are desperate to find employees. A number of clients of our law firm have already indicated that if the H-1B program becomes too burdensome and they cannot adequately meet their employment needs, they will consider closing their US operations and moving overseas where labor is much cheaper and readily available.
Progress continues on getting the site ready to go.
We expect to have the employer data entry portion of the site available in the next few days. The portion of the site for job seekers will be ready shortly after that. In a nutshell, job seekers will be able to post their resumes and scan through listings of positions and employers will be able to advertise their jobs and scan through the VisaJobs resume database. In a few days, all of the lawyers of our law firm will be making our annual trek to the yearly meeting of the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Houston, Texas. The program is a four day intensive continuing education program and it also serves as a mass forum for government officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, US Information Agency, State Department and Labor Department to communicate directly with AILA members.