What if the U.S. government allowed corporations to import global talent without constraints? Quite a few good people would lose their jobs. But somewhere between unrestrained access to global talent and the current annual quota on H-1B visas lies a more beneficial equilibrium.
In just two days last week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department was flooded with 133,000 requests for 65,000 H-1B slots. The USCIS cut off the application process – get this – nearly two months faster than it did last year and four months faster than in 2005. What’s going on here?
For those of you unfamiliar with the visa acronyms H-1B and L-1, H-1Bs are a regulated mechanism to enable companies to import talent with “specialty” skills otherwise unavailable in the U.S. L-1s are typically used for managers. You won’t be surprised to hear that the vast majority of H-1B workers come from India and work in high-tech jobs, typically as programmers. The otherwise unavailable standard (my words, not theirs) is somewhat related to location, too. In some instances, these skills exist domestically, but available workers don’t want to move to the employer’s location. It’s a highly imperfect market.
Assuming the applications are in order, the winners are drawn at random. The H-1B workers can stay for up to three years and if an extension is granted, six years is also possible. Employers must pay market wages – yet another point of controversy about the use (or misuse) of these visas. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report last June that found “more than 3,000 applications that were certified even though the wage rate on the application was lower than the prevailing wage for that occupation.”
H-1B reform is a possibility, according to an article in the current InformationWeek, Senators Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., have proposed to bar companies from outsourcing H-1B or L-1 workers to other companies. Critics of the visa program cite data that show the largest users of the program (measured by applicants) are Indian service providers. But more importantly it would ask these employers to make a “good faith” effort to hire domestically first rather than import global talent. Interestingly, under the Grassley-Durbin bill, the USCIS would go into the business of hosting a job board to match American candidates to these positions. That’s such a wacky idea it might pass – assuming the cap is raised substantially, too.
As InformationWeek’s Marianne Kolbasuk McGee points out, if Congress fails to act on the reforms this year, an election year is a remote possibility at best. How would you propose to fix this process?
