H-1B Visa Cap for Next Fiscal Year Almost Reached
By Huijuan Jia
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29, 2004 — Lonza Biologics, Inc., whose U.S. headquarters are in Portsmouth, routinely rotates employees from its foreign sites worldwide, a practice that has allowed the company to thrive. But they have recently run into problems as the number of visas available to foreign workers has dwindled.
Every year U.S. companies hire thousands of foreign professionals who need to apply for H-1B visas in order to work in this country. But this year, many employers in need of foreign workers may not be able to fill their vacancies because the H-1B visas available for fiscal year 2005, which starts Oct. 1, may soon be depleted.
Lonza, a biopharmaceutical manufacturer, has 45 foreign workers among its 450 employees. Eric Cook, Lonza’s legal counsel, said that two senior executives of the company are H-1B visa holders, one the chief operating officer and the other a vice president.
“We just squeezed one of them in and got a visa before the 2004 cap cut off,” Cook said in a telephone interview, “If we had been a day late, we would have had no options to bring him in before Oct. 1 and we would have had to wait for another year.”
Thomas W. Hildreth, a Manchester lawyer who practices immigration law said Lonza Biologics “would have not been here if it weren’t allowed to have transferred expertise that has been developed in Europe to the United States.”
“So by allowing 45 foreign workers to come in, we created 450 direct U.S. jobs, not to mention hundreds and thousands supporting jobs that are directly tied to the operation,” Hildreth said.
The U.S. government grants 65,000 H-1B visas a year to foreign workers in some specialty occupations, mainly in computer-related industries, architecture, engineering and surveying industries, jobs that companies say they can’t fill with U.S. citizens. But the applications for these visas for fiscal year 2005 have almost reached the 65,000 quota.
A U.S. firm hiring an employee with an H-1B visa must demonstrate that it is unable to find a qualified American citizen for the job and must agree to pay the foreign worker a wage comparable to what a U.S. worker would earn, in addition to benefits.
In February of this year, a six months before the fiscal year ends, the quota was filled for 2004. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which runs the program, started accepting applications April 1 for fiscal 2005. The federal agency said by Aug. 18 it had received 45,900 H-1B applications for fiscal 2005. Earlier the bureau announced that as of Aug. 4, 40,000 H-1B petitions had been filed.
Chris Bentley, the spokesman for the citizenship and immigration services, said Tuesday the numbers for September should be released next week.
Out of the 65,000 visas, approximately 6,800 are reserved for Chile (1,400 visas) and Singapore nationals (5,400 visas) under their free trade agreements with the United States. Thus, the actual number of H-1B visas open to all other nationals is only 58,200.
U.S. employers who need foreign workers to fill key positions are keeping a close eye on the nearly filled quota.
In a Sept. 7 letter to all members of Congress, the Information Technology Association of America, a trade association representing companies including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, AT&T and Boeing, listed the H-1B visa issue as one of the eight legislative “Must-Do’s” that it urged Congress to act on this session.
The H-1B visa shortage “seriously restricts the ability of U.S. businesses to vie for the best talent and hurts their long-term competitiveness in the United States and global markets,” the letter said.
In another letter addressed to Congress regarding the H-1B visa issue, the lobbyist group Compete America , a coalition of more than 200 companies including Intel, Cisco Systems, DuPont, Eli Lilly and Hewlett-Packard, urged the lawmakers to support legislation that would provide an immediate exemption from the H-1B quota to foreign nationals graduating from U.S. universities with Masters and PhD degrees.
In April a bill to exempt up to 20,000 aliens holding a master’s or higher degree from H-1B cap was introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), though there has been no legislative action taken on it since.
Compete America said in its letter that in some areas of study, such as physical sciences and engineering, up to 50 percent of the Masters and PhD degrees awarded in any given year are earned by foreign nationals.
“The reality is that employers often have little choice but to hire American-educated foreign nationals either as new college hires through on-campus recruiting efforts or later in lateral moves as more experienced professionals,” Compete America said in the letter.
The coalition also noted that refusing to issue H-1B visas to these foreign workers would make the United States lose talent to its global competitors. In past years, many foreign students had little choice but to wait for new H-1B visas to become available, because there was little employment opportunity in their home countries or other countries. That is no longer the case.
“Highly educated foreign nationals now have a world of career options,” the coalition said in its letter, “It is imperative that we work to keep this homegrown talent in the United States instead of going to work for our competitors abroad.”
The Information Technology Association also supported exclusion for workers with graduate degrees from U.S. schools.
“This is a simple step consistent with the goals of the country as well as the needs of the economy,” said association President Harris Miller.
Lobbyists also suggested an increase in the H-1B visa cap to meet the actual demand for foreign workers.
The U.S. did not have any numerical restriction on H-1B visas until 1991, when Congress imposed a yearly ceiling of 65,000 visas. That cap was first hit in 1997, and again in 1998 due to an increase in demand for foreign workers driven by the booming economy in the mid 1990s.
In response to pressure from U.S. businesses, which included Bill Gates testifying on Capitol Hill in support of increasing the cap on H-1B visas, Congress passed the American Competitiveness and Work Force Improvement Act of 1998, which raised the cap on H-1B visas from 65,000 to 115,000 in 1999 and 2000. But the cap was still hit in both years.
In 2000, Congress increased the cap to 195,000 for 2001, 2002 and 2003. However, as the economy slowed down, less than half of the cap was reached in 2002 and 2003. Congress reduced the cap to its original level for 2004, resulting in the depletion of H-1B visas this February.
The right number of annual H-1B visas lies somewhere between 115,000 and 195,000, said Hildreth, the Manchester immigration lawyer.
“When I look at the numbers, the history of up and down nature, it is the frequent changing of the target that has been the problem,” Hildreth said in a telephone interview. “It has made it difficult for the employers who do use H-1B workers to rely on and to have confidence that it will be available when the need is there.”
