Senate passes H-1B visa reform bill amendment

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 5/28/2007

The price American companies pay for foreign workers could be on its way to becoming significantly higher.

Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of an amendment to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 that hikes up the fee a company pays for an H-1B visa from $1,500 to $5,000 each.

Companies need not panic just yet: although the amendment has been agreed upon, the controversial bill itself is still being debated in the Senate and has not yet been voted on.

H-1B visas have been the subject of contentious debate for some time now, as the passes for skilled foreign workers have proven to be increasingly coveted commodities in recent years. Last month, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap of 65,000 for fiscal year 2008 just one day after starting the receipt of applications, marking the fifth year in a row that the cap has been reached before the start of the fiscal year. For fiscal 2007, it took under two months for the cap to be reached.

The bill currently under consideration in the House and the Senate would raise the H-1B cap to 115,000, and apply the current 20,000 cap exemption to those with a master's degree or higher from an institution of higher education in a foreign country, not just U.S. advanced degrees. The bill would also raise the limit on employment-based visas from 140,000 to 290,000 per year.

The cap hasn't always been so low: Congress did raise the cap to 195,000 in 2000 to accommodate the U.S.'s technology boom. By the 2004 fiscal year, however, the cap was back down to 65,000, and it has not been changed since.

Not surprisingly, a number of companies have expressed support for the bill to up the yearly quantity of visas to bring in foreign talent—the amendment agreed to yesterday, however, may well subdue their enthusiasm. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Independent congressman from Vermont who proposed the passed amendment, had no hesitation in admitting his intention of substantially lessening the appeal of hiring foreign workers for U.S.-based jobs.

"When it comes to the H-1B visa, our corporate friends tell us that Americans can't do, or are too dumb to do [U.S.-based jobs]," Sen. Sanders said in an outspoken statement posted May 22 on his official website. "We hear over and over again from the large multinational corporations that there are jobs that Americans just won't do, and that we need foreign workers to fill those jobs."

"Well, that's really not quite true. If you pay an American or any person good wages and good benefits, they will do the work," Sanders added.

Name-checking executives including former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Sanders said that "greed, rather than love of country, has become the driving force behind corporate decisions."

"They shut down plants with high-skilled, well-paid American workers, and move to China, where they pay desperate people 50 cents an hour," Sanders said. "…They have the nerve to come before the U.S Congress and tell us that they can't find skilled workers to do the jobs that they need. Give me a break."

Versions of the bill remain under debate in both the House and the Senate.