On my way to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I read a short column in the International Herald Tribune. It was a small note on the upper right corner of a page dominated by a headline about Thailand blocking Youtube access.
The article, subtly titled “U.S. hits high-tech visa limit”, dryly reports that the U.S. immigration authorities have started to reject applications from skilled foreign workers seeking visas to work in America during the 2008 fiscal year.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Agency (USCIS, ruled by Homeland Security) said that the country had reached its limit for 2008 H-1B visa petitions in a single day and would not accept any more, to the dismay of technology companies that rely on the visas for hiring skilled foreign workers. The agency had begun accepting applications on Monday 9th of April 2007 for the fiscal year starting October 1 and said that it had received about 150,000 applicatioons by midafternoon. Only about 65,000 visas are granted.
The agency said it would use computers to randomly pick visa recipients from the applications received Monday and Tuesday. it will reject the remaining applications and return the filing fees. In 2004, the time window to apply for an H-1B visa was open for several months until the cap had been reached.
At Microsoft, about a third of its 46,000 U.S. based employees have work visas or are legal permanent residents with green cards, said Ginn Terzano, a spokeswoman for the company.
A quote from Robert Hoffman, an Oracle vice president and co-chairman of Compete America, a coalition that includes Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and others: “Our broken visa policies for highly educated foreign professionals are not only counterproductive, they are anti-competitive and detrimental to America’s long-term economic competitiveness.”
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