Janis Peterson-Lord Immigration Law Blog on Lawyers.com

There is some controversy surrounding the use of H-1B visas by companies that are being bailed out by the US government in the current financial crisis.

On February 06, 2009, the U.S. Senate agreed to set restrictions on the hiring of H-1B workers by financial services firms that receive federal bailout funds, but it didn't bar the hiring of foreign workers as some in Washington would have liked.  U.S. Senators. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) had proposed legislation that would prohibit any firm that received money under the Troubled Assets Relief Program from hiring H-1B foreign workers.  The amendment that passed didn't include a blanket restriction on H-1B use and instead set a series of strict standards on H-1B hiring.

The Senate's amendment would require companies receiving funds, most of them financial services firms, to comply with hiring rules set for "H-1B dependent" firms -- those with more than 15% of their workers on H-1B visas.  The H-1B dependent designation subjects employers to a number of provisions, These obligations require that such employers not displace U.S. workers from jobs and that such employers recruit U.S. workers before hiring H-1B nonimmigrants.
An H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant visa, meaning that it is for a temporary length of time that a worker can come to the United States for employment. It is a work visa for what are called "specialty occupations.”  Better known to a lay person as a professional occupation, they are occupations that requires a bachelor’s degree or higher.  An H-1B worker might be a computer professional, they can be a teacher, an engineer, a market researcher, or any other position that can be shown to require a Bachelor’s degree.

All of those professions are competing for H1B visas.  Microsoft  typically hires H-1Bs and Bill Gates has spoken to Congress several times to ask for them to expand the annual number of H-1Bs available.  Often a company will hire an H-1B employee because there is a shortage of the kind of professional in the United States and the business can’t find an American that qualifies for the position.  

In Fiscal Year 2004, the amount of H-1B visas that United States Congress allowed was reduced from 195,000 to the current annual allotment of 65,000.   Last April, USCIS received more than double that amount of applications for H-1B workers to begin work in Fiscal Year 2009, and USCIS was forced to engage in a lottery in order to determine who would obtain the H-1B visas.  This scenario has occurred consistently in recent years, but now we are faced with the recent financial meltdown.  No one knows how many businesses will be petitioning for H-1B workers in the coming year.

Janice Peterson-Lord
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