"This year, we are looking to clear the backlog," said Robert Hoffman, a vice president at Oracle Corp. and co-chair of Compete America, a Washington-based lobbying group that represents IT vendors, universities and other organization that support an increase in the visa cap.

While there is support for raising the H-1B cap in Congress, proponents have been stymied by the lack of progress on the broader immigration-reform issue. Backers of immigration reform in the House and Senate want any H-1B changes to be included as part of a wider overhaul and not treated separately.

Grassley and Durbin may be the two strongest in the Senate. Grassley, for instance, recently to give U.S. citizens and permanent residents job priority over H-1B holders as it lays off up to 5,000 workers.

Microsoft responded that it would lay off H-1B workers as part of the job cuts but that it would continue to hire visa holders as well. And in a post on its public policy blog Monday, the software vendor .

The bill that Grassley and Durbin proposed in 2007, then called the H-1B and L-1 Visa Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act, will be reintroduced with some changes, but its broad thrust is expected to remain. The earlier bill would have required employers to advertise job openings for 30 days before submitting H-1B applications for those positions. It also sought to prevent employers from hiring H-1B workers and then outsourcing them to other companies.