New Bill Could Make H-1B Visas Harder To GetNew Bill Could Make H-1B Visas Harder To Get

It only took one day for the U.S. government to receive enough applications from employers to fill the 65,000 slots that can be allotted in fiscal 2008 to foreign IT workers seeking H-1B visas.

However, if passed, a bipartisan bill introduced this week could make it even tougher for employers to hire H-1B workers in the future.

The H-1B and L-1 Visa Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act of 2007, introduced by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., aims to reform the visa program most commonly used to bring foreign IT professionals into the United States temporarily.

The bill's proposals include requiring all employers to "pledge" they've made a good-faith effort to fill those positions with American workers before seeking H-1B holders. Currently, only employers with a large percentage of workers need to ensure that they've made a good-faith attempt at hiring American workers.

Today, large vendors like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard that employ hundreds or even thousands of H-1B workers are still only using that foreign talent for a small percentage of their total workforce. For instance, at HP, H-1B workers have made up only 1% to 1.5% of its workforce over the last 10 years, according to HP officials in 2006, which last year said the company's total U.S. employee headcount was about 54,000.

However, among the largest employers of H-1B workers are Indian outsourcing firms such as Wipro, Infosys, and Cognizant. Among the bill's proposals is a provision aimed particularly at these types of offshore companies, or "job shops" that bring foreign workers into the United States to train for a short time, and then outsource these workers to U.S. companies.

"This is a method that some companies use to evade restrictions on hiring H-1Bs," according to a release issued from Grassley's office.

Other provisions include permitting the U.S. Department of Labor to do random audits of any company using H-1B workers and mandatory audits of companies with more than 100 employees of which 15% are H-1B workers.

The bill also requires employers seeking H-1B workers to advertise the position for 30 days on a Labor Department Web site so that American workers know about the jobs and to ban employers from advertising jobs as "H-1B only."

Kim Berry, president of IT professional group Programmer's Guild, said in an interview he hopes the Durbin-Grassley bill gains traction but would like to see even more stringent requirements.

For instance, in addition to requiring employers to advertise their potential H-1B jobs on a Labor Department site, he'd like Americans to have the ability to apply for those jobs via the site, so that employers are more accountable about alleged shortages of U.S. talent.

"There needs to be transparency of skills," he said.