Scramble to sponsor foreign workers for US visas
July 31 2009 by Rebekah Nahai
US visa shortage for Silicon Valley
Hi-tech US companies are feeling the economic crunch as they rush to secure US visas for foreign talent.
H-1B visas allow US companies to employ overseas workers with specialty skills for up to six years. But the US Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) has already received 163,000 applications for the 85,000 available visas this year.
Since 2007, USCIS has responded to the application overload with a lottery selection system.
The US visa shortage is hitting small companies the hardest. The absence of key staff has more impact on small businesses than large organisations and can impede their ability to grow.
Axiom Microdevices of Irvine, California, is one tech company suffering from a foreign talent shortage.
“We don't have US designers who can do this work and at this point, we can't hire enough people to grow as quickly as we would like,” says Axiom vice president Donald McClymont. “It's becoming a big problem for us.”
The rise in H-1B visa applications for foreign workers corresponds with the decline in computer science graduates from US universities. Enrolment in these courses dropped has 43% percent since 2004 according to the Computing Research Association, a Washington DC advocacy group.
For the workers selected for US visas, other problems loom. The backlog for green cards, which allow workers to reside permanently in the US, is formidable.
About 500,000 foreign workers are currently awaiting green cards, a process which can take up to ten years. Indian and Chinese workers sometimes wait longer due to the high number of applications from their countries.
Foreign H-1B visa applicants are often ambitious and entrepreneurial, but US visa holders cannot start businesses in the US until they have green cards. They must also hold the same position within their companies for the entire green card processing period.
The result is that some of the best and brightest become discouraged and leave the country.
Robert Litan, vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Kansas City, said: “One in four successful high-tech entrepreneurs in the last decade were immigrants. A lot of those people leave rather than take a chance staying here.”
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