"Although this bill ostensibly seeks to increase STEM visas, it appears to have another, in my opinion, more sinister purposeto actually reduce legal immigration levels," said Lofgren, in a statement.

Lofgren cited the elimination of the diversity visa, but also faulted the bill for now allowing unused visas to be used to reduce green card backlogs.

Chuck Schumer's bill is similar to Lofgren's bill.

Congress is due to soon recess in advance of the November election.

Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .