Plan to Increase High-Tech Work Visas Dies in Senate

In a surprising defeat for the nation’s high-tech industry, a bill that would have allowed as many as 142,500 additional skilled foreign workers into the country was killed in the Senate on Friday.

Both the House and the Senate had passed earlier versions of the bill, and a compromise with the White House had been worked out last month.

But a small number of senators were able to block a vote on the bill late on Friday, killing its chance of passage this year.

The bill’s supporters said the defeat will have dire consequences for high-tech industries, which say they have been hard-pressed to find enough skilled workers to deal with such issues as the year-2000 problem.

Under current law, 65,000 of the visas, known as H-1B visas, are granted each year to noncitizen computer programmers and other highly skilled professionals to work in the United States for up to six years.

The bill would have nearly doubled that number, to 115,000 for the next two years, and 107,500 in the third year. After that, the level would drop back to 65,000.

Supporters had called the bill an important initiative to help reinforce the nation’s position of dominance in the high-tech arena.

The bill’s chief Senate sponsor, Michigan Republican Spencer Abraham, told Reuters that the United States cannot fill the 130,000 new information jobs a year without importing foreign workers.

“This is a severe problem and it is especially severe at this time,” said Abraham, noting that the industry is trying to resolve the millennium bug, which may cause some computers and other electronic systems to fail if their internal clocks do not recognize the year 2000.

High-tech companies, particularly those in technology-rich California, rallied behind the measure as a way of easing the persistent labor crunch that has afflicted such areas as Silicon Valley.

According to a study by the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank, more than one-third of the engineers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born. High technology accounts for about 18% of the state’s employment base.

The bill was bitterly opposed by a coalition of anti-immigration Republicans, pro-labor Democrats and some engineering professional groups.

They maintained that the measure was not needed by industry and unfair to American workers. They also argued that it could make it easier for companies to exploit foreign workers.

Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin, an opponent of the bill, said he thought the alarms over a shortage of high-tech American workers was overblown at this time, but was willing to take another look at the issue next year.

“Right now it does not appear that the demand is there that they have anticipated,” Harkin told Reuters.

The White House initially opposed the measure, raising a number of concerns centered on demands for more protections for American workers.

In a compromise last month that won White House backing, Senate leaders agreed to place tighter restrictions on employers who depend on the program for 15% or more of their work force.

The companies would have been required to pledge not to lay off any American workers over a six-month period and not to use foreign workers if they could find a comparably qualified American worker.

Reuters was used in compiling this report.