Employers Scramble Now That H-1B Quota Is FullEmployers Scramble Now That H-1B Quota Is Full

The United States has hit its 65,000 cap on the number of H-1B visas that will be granted in fiscal 2004, meaning that companies seeking to hire foreign workers to fill some IT positions will have to wait till Oct. 1, the start of the government's new fiscal year.

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration, which issues the visas and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, says it's "way too early" for the agency to analyze and disclose the breakdown of skills possessed by the people who were granted the H-1B visas in 2004--or the list of employers seeking the largest number of visas. In addition to IT workers such as programmers, the H-1B program also covers a variety of jobs in health care, engineering, and even fashion modeling.

The ceiling of 65,000 visas for the year was reached in only about five months, meaning that employers wishing to hire foreign workers with the skills covered under the program must wait nearly seven months to submit new applications for the visas--or hire or train American workers with those skills instead.

In 2003, the United States issued about 78,000 H-1B visas, well under the cap of 195,000 visas that was allowed at that time. During the height of the IT-skills shortage in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Congress had more than doubled the number of H-1B visas granted annually, but that increase expired at the end of fiscal 2003. The cap is slated to remain at 65,000 in fiscal 2005.

The H-1B program has been controversial, especially during the economic downturn and because of the trend to offshore outsourcing. Some employers continue to complain about the availability of key IT skills in American workers, while some unemployed IT professionals say employers are looking to hire cheaper labor.

Adrian Williams, an IT manager at a health-care firm, said Wednesday that his company sometimes hires foreign workers because they have more experience and are more affordable than even some recent college grads; these U.S. workers are sometimes willing to take lesser-paying jobs but take much longer to train.

"I think the United States might have made it too easy in the past to hire foreign workers, because we could've been building expertise here among younger workers, who instead were filling jobs in call centers, helping to install AOL, or doing more basic work like that," Williams says. "But the bottom line is that you need to hire the best person for the job, and sometimes that means hiring someone from outside the U.S." Still, even when hiring a foreign-born IT worker for temporary positions, he adds, "the communication-soft skills and cultural differences make it more difficult."