U.S. senators question several companies about visa program for high-tech workers
WASHINGTON (AP) – Two U.S. senators are questioning several companies about their use of a visa program for highly skilled workers.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, a Republican, and Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said they are focusing on nine companies, several of them India-based, that used nearly 20,000 of the 75,000 H-1B visas that were available last year.
H-1B visas are for high-skilled workers and are heavily used in the high-tech industry.
”I continue to hear how people want to increase the number of H-1B visas that are available to companies,” Grassley said in a news release. ”Considering the high amount of fraud and abuse in the visa program, we need to take a good, hard look at the employers who are using H-1B visas and how they are using them.”
Grassley and Durbin, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee, sent letters to the nine companies asking several questions about their visa use, wages and layoffs.
The top users were identified with statistics from Citizenship and Immigration Services, the senators said.
The letters, posted on Grassley’s Web site, were addressed to five companies in India and four in the United States.
Under federal law, 65,000 H-1B visas are available each year for workers in specialty fields such as computer programmers, engineers, architects, accountants, doctors, college professors and fashion models.
Another 20,000 visas are available for foreign workers with at least a master’s degree from a U.S. college or university. The numbers do not include current H-1B visa holders. Federal law sets requirements for H-1B holders’ salaries.
The high-tech industry has long complained that too few visas are available. Microsoft Corp. is among a group of companies that has pushed for increasing the available visas. This year, the limit for applications for the visas was reached in record time.
”Collecting information is fine, but we think abuse of the system is the exception rather than the rule,” said Eric Thomas, a spokesman for Compete America, a coalition that includes Microsoft, chip maker Intel Corp., business software company Oracle Corp. and others.
Increasing U.S. competitiveness by providing more visas for skilled workers has been a key issue in congressional efforts to craft a comprehensive immigration bill. At least two bills have been filed that would increase available H-1B visas to 115,000 a year.
—-
On the Net:
Sen. Chuck Grassley: http://grassley.seante.gov
Sen. Dick Durbin: http://durbin.senate.gov
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.