Immigration Developments, March 2011
NEWS ITEM ONE: NOTICE TO EMPLOYERS—April 1, 2011 is the first date to apply for FY 2012 H-1B Visas
NEWS ITEM TWO: USCIS Announces Proposed H-1B Electronic Registration System to Reduce Costs for U.S. Businesses
NEWS ITEM THREE: America's visa restrictions lead to reverse brain drain
COMMENTARY
1. NEWS ITEM ONE: NOTICE TO EMPLOYERS—April 1, 2011 is the first date to apply for FY 2011 H-1B Visas
2. NEWS ITEM TWO: USCIS Announces Proposed H-1B Electronic Registration System to Reduce Costs for U.S. Businesses
The Federal Register: March 3, 2011 (Volume 76, Number 42) has announced a proposed rule. Under the proposed rule, employers seeking to petition for H-1B workers subject to the statutory cap would register electronically with USCIS. Before the petition filing period begins, USCIS would select the number of registrations predicted to exhaust all available visas. Employers would then file petitions only for the selected registrations. The registration system would save employers the effort and expense of filing H-1B petitions, as well as Labor Condition Applications, for workers who would be unable to obtain visas under the statutory cap.
USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas announced the opening of a 60-day comment period that will allow businesses and the general public to provide input on the proposed system in order to ensure it best meets the needs of employers that rely on H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers for specialty occupations.
“The proposed rule would create a more efficient and cost-effective process for businesses interested in bringing workers in specialty occupations to the United States,” he said. “Improving the H-1B petition process is part of USCIS’s ongoing efforts to leverage new ideas and innovation to streamline our operations and enhance customer service.”
We will see how many of the proposed changes survive through the comment period. To me, this seems like another road block put up by the administration against H-1B visa holders. See News Item 3.
3. NEWS ITEM THREE: America's visa restrictions lead to reverse brain drain
Tom Brokaw submitted an excellent article on this topic March 3 on NBC. For the full report, please access:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41894670/from/RSS/
The creator of SnapDeal is an Indian entrepreneur. SnapDeal has created 300 jobs in India — and counting. The founder of this company is Kunar Bahl. “I put my chips in the American basket and said let me try my hand here,” said Bahl, who earned an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a business degree from its Wharton School. But Bahl's visa ran out, and he took his skills back to India.
Why are we losing individuals such as Mr. Bahl? He could have created those jobs in the United States. But, the H-1B is a a strange visa. The visa has a bizarre cap system—65,000 total visas with and an advanced degree exemption provided to the first 20,000 petitions filed for a beneficiary who has obtained a U.S. master’s degree or higher.
Why do we have this H-1B cap system? If the economy is shrinking we do not need a visa cap. Companies are shrinking not hiring, rendering the visa cap irrelevant. If the economy is booming, the H-1B visa cap system is actually hurting the economy in aggregate. If the economy is growing why would we turn away skilled professionals such as Mr. Bahl? Such an individual, if allowed to stay, would have created job opportunities domestically. This would have allowed the continued growth of the domestic economy. Instead, the H-1B cap system is creating reverse brain drain, as documented in Mr. Brokaw’s NBC article.
Congress should do away with the H-1B cap system. If Congress insists on keeping the cap, perhaps it should consider a dynamic cap number, rather than a static one. What I mean by a dynamic limit is that if the economy grows by a particular amount, Congress should raise the 65,000 amount based on that growth figure. We will see what, if anything, Congress decides to do.
