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, 3/31/00), 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).
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.
