The beginning of April brings with it two Opening Days:
baseball season and H-1B season.
Opening Day for baseball is a time when fans of every team can look
forward to a season throughout which their team can do battle with the players
they have assembled in order to have the best chance at success. By contrast, the H-1B Opening Day is an
annual reminder of the visa cap that limits companies’ ability to hire the
skilled workers that best fit their needs, with the possibility of the season
ending almost before it begins.
On April 1, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
(USCIS) began accepting petitions for H-1B temporary work visas for FY 2014. For the past four years, since the
economic downturn in 2008, the H-1B cap (65,000 visas + 20,000 for advanced
degree holders) has been hit in December 2009, January 2011, November 2011 and June
2012. While these were
improvements over previous years in which the cap was hit within days, it
should be pointed out that even the latest of these dates was less than four
months into the fiscal year, leaving more than nine months in which visas were
unavailable to employers.
According to a press
release last month, “USCIS anticipates that it may receive more petitions than
the H-1B cap between April 1, 2013 and April 5, 2013”, and may “use a lottery
system to randomly select the number of petitions required to reach the
numerical limit.”
This would be
the same situation
that occurred in 2007 and 2008. It
is ludicrous to force U.S. tech companies to go through a lottery in order to
hire the skilled foreign workers they need, many of whom have been studying at
U.S. universities. If uncertainty
in the business environment is the biggest impediment to getting companies
investing and hiring, it makes absolutely no sense to have a lottery, the very
epitome of uncertainty, at the end of the hiring process. With the introduction of bills in
Congress like the Immigration Innovation (I-Squared) Act, there appears to be
more support than ever among lawmakers for increasing high-skilled visas, and
we are hopeful that such reforms will be included in any comprehensive
immigration reform legislation.
This is one reform that simply can’t wait ‘til next year.
