By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : With the revived comprehensive immigration reform bill expected to come up before the Senate this week, several high-tech companies like Microsoft have mounted a campaign to get more foreign skilled workers into the United States.
Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft have led a parade of high-tech executives to Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to provide more visas for temporary foreign workers and permanent immigrants who can fill critical jobs, the New York Times reported Monday.
Google has reminded senators that one of its founders, Sergey Brin, came from the Soviet Union as a young boy. To stay competitive in a "knowledge-based economy," company officials have said, Google needs to hire many more immigrants as software engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists.
High-tech companies want to be able to hire larger numbers of well-educated, foreign-born professionals who, they say, can help them succeed in the global economy, it said.
For these scientists and engineers, they seek permanent-residence visas, known as green cards, and H-1B visas. The H-1B programme provides temporary work visas for people who have university degrees or the equivalent to fill jobs in specialty occupations including health care and technology.
The Senate bill would expand the number of work visas for skilled professionals, but high-tech companies say the proposed increase is not nearly enough. Several provisions of the Senate bill are meant to enhance protections for American workers and to prevent visa fraud and abuse.
The proposed "point system" to evaluate immigrants seeking green cards would reward people who have advanced degrees and job skills needed in the United States. But the high-tech companies were upset because the bill would have stripped them of the ability to sponsor specific immigrants for particular jobs, the Times said.
Under a proposed amendment, 20,000 green cards would be set aside each year for immigrants of extraordinary ability, outstanding professors and researchers and certain managers and executives of multinational corporations. The original bill would have eliminated the existing preference for such workers.
In addition, the amendment would give employers five years to adjust their hiring practices to the new "merit-based" point system for obtaining green cards.
The number of green cards for employer-sponsored immigrants would gradually decline, to 44,000 in the fifth year from 115,000 in each of the first two years. No green cards would be set aside for employer-sponsored immigrants after that.
Many high-tech companies bring in foreign professionals on temporary H-1B visas. The government is swamped with petitions. On the first two days of the application period in April, it received more than 123,000 petitions for 65,000 slots.
The Senate bill would raise the cap to 115,000 in 2008, with a possible increase to 180,000 in later years, based on labour market needs.
Many high-tech businesses want to hire foreign students who obtain advanced degrees from American universities, and many of the students want to work here, but cannot get visas. Under current law, up to 20,000 foreigners who earn a master's degree or higher from an American university are generally exempt from the annual limit on new H-1B visas.
Te amendment would also establish a new exemption, providing 20,000 additional H-1B visas for people who have earned advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics from a university outside the United States.
The technology companies face a serious challenge from a different direction, as lawmakers of both parties worry about possible abuses in the H-1B programme.
High-tech companies said that the wage standards under a proposed amendment would, in effect, require them to pay some H-1B employees more than some equally qualified American workers who are performing the same duties.
The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said that thousands of H-1B workers have been paid less than the prevailing wage, the Times said. A Mumbai based company, Patni Computer Systems, agreed this month to pay more than $2.4 million to 607 workers with visas after Labour Department investigators found that they had not been paid the wages required by federal law, the Times said.