A high-powered Senate panel on immigration reform appears to be divided on the extent of expansion and reform of the H-1B visa programme that has been used predominantly to bring Indian software professionals to work in the US.
The US tech industry has for long been campaigning for expanding the visa programme to ensure America retains its competitive edge, but some key lawmakers in Congress have been pulling in different directions. The high demand among tech companies for these visas was tellingly demonstrated last week with the whole 85,000 H-1B visas for fiscal 2014 having run out in just five days. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced on Monday that it received as many as 124,000 petitions against the annual cap of 85,000 visas, prompting them to use a computerised lottery mechanism to pick the winners.
“For cap-subject petitions not randomly selected, USCIS will reject andreturn the petition with filing fees, unless it is found to be aduplicate filing,” the agency said.
The Senate panel, meanwhile, is reportedly still mulling whether to allow just a modest increase of the cap or a much larger number of 150,000 and beyond as demanded by the tech industry, including Microsoft, Google and Intel.
On the Democratic side, Senator Dick Durbin, who is also Assistant Majority leader, is firm on punishing companies that reportedly train workers in the US only to ship the jobs overseas, the reference predominantly being to Indian IT majors. Some fear that the dispute could result in provisions that would punish other companies that are not involved in the reported abuses of this visa programme.
“There’s a broad expectation that this bill will recognise the need to bring in highly skilled talent as well as those who will work hard from both ends of the spectrum,” said Matt Sonnesyn of the Business Round Table.