When the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began accepting applications for an additional 20,000 H-1B visas earlier this month, it had devised a computer program to help randomly select visa petitions in the event of a torrent. But a rush for the latest round of visas hasn"t materialized. The immigration agency said this week that since it began taking applications on May 12, it has received only 6,400 petitions.
The additional visas are available to foreign nationals who have graduated from a U.S. university with a master"s degree or above.
Lynn Shotwell, executive director for the American Council on International Personnel, a professional association in Washington whose board of directors includes representatives of multinational firms, still anticipates that the visa applications will be used up.
According to Shotwell, the application process requires proof of a diploma, and she believes that once students get those diplomas, the number of applicants "will increase significantly." She predicts that the visas will be gone by midsummer.
The original visa cap for the federal fiscal year of 2005, which began Oct. 1, was set at 65,000. But those visas were quickly claimed last fall, prompting industry and academic groups to lobby Congress for an increase in the cap. That resulted in the H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004 and the additional visas that are now available.
Opponents of the controversial visa cap, which has in recent years been set as high as 195,000, argue that the influx of skilled foreign workers is costing U.S. citizens and permanent residents jobs.
Earlier this month, H-1B visa supporters got some help from Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, who said that preventing "smart people" from entering the U.S. workforce by placing a cap on H-1B visas "doesn"t make sense".
Those comments were blasted a few days later by Gerald Cohen, founder and CEO of New York-based Information Builders Inc. In an interview with Computerworld, Cohen said that Gates is "full of it. He"s going there [to China and India] because it"s just cheaper."