H1-B visas are given to foreign workers with special skills who will gain temporary employment in the United States in so-called "specialty" occupations, such as technology. The visas usually have a limit of six years but can be renewed under special circumstances.
The Senate's provision proposes to boost the number of H-1B visas by nearly tenfold over the next 10 years. The annual limit on H-1B visas, now 65,000, would rise to 115,000 in the first fiscal year after the enactment of the Securing Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership Act.
Each year thereafter, the limit would increase by 20 percent. U.S.-educated foreign workers with advanced degrees would be exempted from H-1B visa quotas.
The Innovation and Leadership Act, introduced May 2 by Texas Senator John Cornyn, is currently under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has passed its own immigration reform bill that makes no mention of H-1B quotas. So it's uncertain if the Senate's H-1B provision will survive House-Senate negotiations and actually become law.
Several solution providers welcomed the prospect of more IT talent from abroad, noting that it has been difficult finding high-tech workers with the skills their businesses need.
"If I could find people with the right skills and experience in New York, I would hire them, but I can't. So I have to go out of the country," said Ed Solomon, co-owner of Net@Work, based in New York City.
Solomon dismissed the argument that boosting the H1-B quota would increase the likelihood that U.S. technology workers would be passed over in favor of cheap labor from overseas. "It has nothing to do with being cheaper," he said. "They're not cheaper; they're just people with certain skills that we are lacking here."
Those sentiments were echoed by Kevin McDonald, vice president of Alvaka Networks in Huntington Beach, Calif. "The reality is that the availability of technical professionals is extremely limited, and we are having a very difficult time finding talent that has the breadth and depth of skills that we are looking for," he said. "When Google went public, they took up a pretty significant number of these people, and the existing quota of H-1Bs has already been reached."
McDonald insisted that foreign workers aren't stealing jobs from U.S. tech professionals. "This may be true in more blue-collar types of jobs, but if [IT] people are unemployed in this market right now, then either skills sets are lacking or job hunting skills need polish."
Besides expanding the high-tech talent pool, the H-1B quota increase could benefit solution providers by slowing the rate of pay hikes for experienced staff. Those increases have averaged 7.5 percent per year for the past two years, more than twice the rate of inflation, according to the 2006 CRN Compensation Survey, which will be released on June 26.
JOHN ROBERTS is director of editorial research at CRN.
