Foreign Labor Visa Program Slots Filled
The federal government won’t accept any more applications for a popular visa program that provides skilled foreign labor to U.S. companies, Citizenship and Immigration Services said.
Less than five months into the fiscal year already there are enough applications to fill all 65,000 slots for H1-B visas, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.
The agency planned to stop accepting applications at the end of the day Tuesday. No new applications will be accepted until April and no additional visas will be issued until Oct. 1, when the next fiscal year begins.
Critics of the H1-B visa program say it allows businesses to fill jobs with cheap foreign labor rather than hiring Americans at higher wages. The high-tech industry and other businesses that use the program say they can’t find enough qualified Americans to do the kind of work they need.
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