H-1Bs back in the news

Last week BusinessWeek reported a new push to get Congress to address the issue of visas for highly skilled workers. The initiative appears to be coming from a lobbying group called CompeteAmerica, a coalition of employers of H-1Bs and related service providers (e.g. American Immigration Lawyers Association).

The coalition members touted in the BusinessWeek article - Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard - appear to be employers who use H-1Bs in the manner the program was originally intended: namely, to bring in the brightest and the best foreign talent to fill positions for which US workers may not be readily available. However, if you dig into some of the umbrella groups on the membership list, you also find the big offshoring firms - WiPro, Infosys, Cognizant - whose use of the visas is more questionable.

It's probably good that the issue of skilled workers is being considered separately from the much larger issue of how to deal with illegal immigration and low-wage workers. My sense was that fighting over amnesty and guest worker provisions dominated that discussion and could potentially have meant a not-so-well-thought-out handling of skilled workers. This is an issue that it's important to get right, and there are lots of problems with the current implementation. There is a good discussion of some of the current system's problems here

Judging from the CompeteAmerica web site, the first issue the group will be pushing is making it easier for skilled workers to get green cards. That seems like a good move; green cards are preferable to H-1Bs in many ways. Why bring smart, skilled people to the US only to send them away a few years later? While such a measure would increase the number of workers competing for high-skill jobs in the US, surely it's better for the native born to compete with those new workers at US wages rather than competing with them at, say, Chinese or Indian wages.