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Silicon Valley Pushes Hard for Visa Bill

American companies hope to recruit more foreign high-tech talent

By May Wong/AP

With an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and three years of experience as a software programmer at Citibank’s office in India, it didn’t take much for Pratibha Gupta to find a job here.

She sent an application to a technical consulting company, which sponsored a highly coveted high-tech work visa for her. Job offers soon poured in, and she switched to programming for an Internet startup in Santa Clara.

“It feels good to know we are wanted, not just here in America, but anywhere in the world,” Gupta, 25, said. “The hardest part was going to the consulate to get my passport stamped.”

With unemployment very low and talent at a premium in Silicon Valley, skilled technology workers like Gupta are gems—especially if they have a six-year H-1B visa from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. That is why high-tech companies heavily lobbied federal lawmakers to pass a bill that would authorize nearly 600,000 new H-1B visas over the next three years.

The bill sped through Congress on Oct. 3, and President Bill Clinton has said he will sign it.

The quick congressional action after nine months of jockeying fulfills an election-year promise by Democratic and Republican leaders to the high-tech world, which is flexing its political muscle through increased lobbying and campaign donations to both parties.

The high-tech industry contends it isn’t a matter of choice.

“It is certainly nearing a crisis stage,” said Jeff Modisett, co-chief executive of TechNet, a national bipartisan political organization that represents high-tech interests.

Computer software and other high-tech companies contend that 300,000 jobs are going unfilled for a lack of qualified workers, threatening a slow in growth.

“We can’t hire enough people,” said Yahoo! Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang. “While we’re big believers in education, and making sure that we get the right people going through our educational system, we also believe that we’re in a global business.

“In Silicon Valley, we don’t think about our competitors being in the U.S. only. We think about the Germans, Japanese, and Latin Americans.”

At San Jose-based Cisco Systems, where 1,000 new employees are hired each month, there are 2,500 job vacancies at any given time. Out of its current work force of more than 34,000 people, about 300 are foreign workers with H-1B visas.

“The availability of a skilled work force is critical not only for Cisco but for all of America,” said Laura Ipsen, Cisco’s director of government relations. “We’re hiring these skilled engineers, and they’re the ones driving the innovation.”

The competition in recruiting such highly skilled workers—and filing for their visas with the INS before the year’s quota fills up—is stiff. The visas are issued on a first-come, first-served basis, and companies have found the national quota filling up earlier and earlier each year, exacerbating the worker shortage.

The majority of workers who make use of the high-tech visas come from India and China.

Under present law, the government issued 115,000 H-1B visas during the fiscal year and the ceiling was to fall to 107,500 this year and to 65,000 next year.

High-tech companies had projected that by 2002—taking into account the growing backlog of visa applications—the cap would be reached even before the fiscal year begins, said Tracy Koon, director of corporate affairs at Intel Corp. in Santa Clara.

Up to 4 percent of the chipmaking giant’s U.S. work force are H-1B visa workers; in 1999, 7 percent of Intel’s new hires were foreign workers. A majority of them were snapped up after they graduated from master’s or doctorate programs at top-notch American universities, Koon said.

“One of them is a computer architect with a Ph.D from Stanford—he could have worked anywhere in the world,” Koon said. “He’s Belgian and we were fortunate to get him, and that there was a visa for him when we hired him a couple of years ago.”