At press time, a bill raising the annual allotment of H-1B visas had passed the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives by an overwhelming vote. It’s expected that President Clinton will sign the measure into law.
The bill has the backing of U.S. high-tech firms—including many visual effects and computer animation studios—that are dependent on recruiting foreign talent to help offset what they contend is a shortage of qualified American workers.
Per the proposed legislation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service could issue as many as 195,000 H-1B visas annually for each of the next three years. This is a nearly 70 percent increase over the allotment of 115,000 for the past fiscal year. That limit of 115,000 was reached this past March (SHOOT, 3/31, p. 1), after just six months of visa issuance. Those 115,000 visas were supposed to accommodate a full year, from Oct. 1., 1999 through Sept. ’00.
This marked the second consecutive year since the visa quota was raised that the cap had been met ahead of schedule. In ’99, the limit of 115,000 was reached in mid-June, nine months into that fiscal year.
If the current bill calling for 195,000 annual H-1Bs isn’t enacted, the allotment would decrease to 107,500 this fiscal year (Oct.’00-Sept. ’01), and then to 65,000 the following year (Oct. ’01-Sept. ’02). The total of 65,000 was the annual limit before the original H-1B visa reform bill took effect two years ago (SHOOT, 10/23/ 98, p. 1).
The rationale behind the original legislation temporarily raising the cap was to provide a short-term fix so that high-tech companies in the U.S. could maintain a full complement of skilled staffers until more homegrown talent is developed. Assorted visual effects/CGI houses have sought foreign talent to fill positions for which, they claimed, skilled American workers couldn’t be found.
Both supporters and opponents of the increased visa allotment seem to agree that the long-term solution is to commit more resources to the U.S. educational system, so that it can turn out a workforce with the necessary technological and artistic skills called for in the new millennium job market. In that vein, the H-1B bill—authored by Reps. David Dreier (R-Calif.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.)—contains a provision that would establish a program to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs.
BIPARTISAN SUPPORT
The proposed legislation that would increase the annual cap to 195,000 has long had strong bipartisan support in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. However, political jockeying had delayed the bill’s passage.
Democrats had been trying to attach other unrelated immigration reforms to the bill, including a controversial provision that would grant amnesty to at least 500,000 immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally but have lived in this country since before 1986. Another proposal would help gain permanent residency for certain foreign nationals who fled from Honduras, Haiti, Guatemala and El Salvador during periods of civil unrest in those nations.
But Democrats made a tactical shift in late September, whereby they would no longer try to link their Latino and Immigration Fairness Act to the H-1B legislation. Instead, Democratic congressional leaders will attempt to attach those immigration provisions to another measure, perhaps a broader-based budget bill.
This cleared the way for the H-1B legislation to pass on its own merit. The Senate vote on the H-1B visa bill was 96 to 1. Shortly thereafter, the House of Representatives approved the bill on a voice vote.
As chronicled in SHOOT, many visual effects/CGI firms view the H-1B visa as being important in helping them fulfill their staffing needs. Among the houses expressing support for H-1B visa reform have been: Rhythm & Hues, Los Angeles; Industrial Light+Magic, San Rafael, Calif.; Digital Domain, Venice, Calif.; PDI/DreamWorks, Palo Alto, Calif.; Blue Sky Studios, White Plains, N.Y.; and Kleiser-Walczak, bicoastal and North Adams, Mass. (SHOOT, 5/5, p. 19).
