The Schumer bill also says that any unused STEM visa green cards will be used "to reduce the backlog for employment-based green cards that exists for highly-skilled STEM advanced-degree graduates from foreign universities."

All sides had been in talks about the possibility of compromise and a bipartisan bill, but those talks broke down last week.

Both parties broadly support a STEM visa. But Republicans are opposed to the idea of raising legal immigration, which made the STEM visa swap with the diversity visa lottery appealing.

The Democrats are less willing to trade-off the diversity lottery. The tech industry is also opposed to constraining immigration, but may nonetheless support Smith's bill when it comes up for vote.

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 .