U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Tuesday that the 2008 quota for the H-1B visa, the non-immigrant visa used by U.S. companies to employ international professionals, many of whom come from India and China, has been depleted on the first day the department began to accept petitions.
A written statement from immigration services stated that as of April 2, it had received more than 150,000 petitions for H-1B visas, which is nearly twice the 85,000 H1-B quota allowed for fiscal year 2008. With the 2008 H-1B cap already exceeded, the department could reject any additional petitions for 2008 received on or after April 4.
This number sets the record for the fastest time the number of visas allowed has been depleted. Last year, the visa supply lasted nearly two months.
The requests are filled on a first-come, first-served basis until the quota is nearly reached. The final applications are then chosen randomly, known as H-1B lottery.
"Not the final applications, but all applications will enter the lottery pool this year. Among those 150,000 first-day petitioners, slightly more than half will get H-1B. All left petitioners, around 65,000, will have to go back to their origin country in a few months, unless they can keep their legitimate identity," said Jonathan Liang, a California immigrations lawyer.
UT-Austin has more than 4,500 international students enrolled, according to the International Office's Web site. More than 15,000 international students are enrolled throughout the entire UT System, 2,000 of which are scheduled to graduate this year.
Most students whose visas are not reinstated do not go back to their countries of origin but rather apply to other universities or for jobs that do not require the visa, Liang said.
Many lawyers doubt the ability of Congress to deal with this issue, both economically and politically.
Liang suggested Congress may have trouble dealing with the billions of dollars in application fees in the visa process. He also said Congress could face resistance from businesses asking for more waivers to the 85,000-person quota.
"Companies, especially those high-tech ones, will follow Bill Gates' steps to persuade Congress to increase the H-1B visa quota. Eighty percent of the H-1B petitioners are university graduates and undergrads employed by high-tech companies and big corporations," he said.
Other companies resort to outsourcing in order to employ immigrant workers, resulting in a loss of U.S. jobs. Liang said outsourcing would result in a loss of taxes and that increasing the H-1B quota could help alleviate the problem for both sides.
"We are going to establish a branch office in Canada, simply for keeping these workers. They can't have H-1B, then we go outsourcing," said a human resource manager of a high-tech company in Redmond, Washington, who declined to give her name because she is not authorized to speak with the media.
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