Silicon Valley foreign worker search speeds up after lull

Technology firms have tripled their recruitment of foreign workers this spring after a hiring lull of several years — a development that is reigniting the debate over immigration rules affecting those workers.

American companies sought more than 32,500 temporary H-1B visas, available for skilled workers, since the annual recruiting period began in April. That is about triple the number sought by the same time last year.

“The demand for the visas is going up,” said Emily Lam of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a business advocate.

The H-1B program remains perennially debated, with businesses arguing they need the skilled workers and opponents saying the foreign recruits displace American workers and undercut wages. Currently, 85,000 such visas may be granted each year, with 20,000 set aside for foreign students graduating from U.S. universities. Many businesses argue for a higher cap.

Even the reason for the springtime spike in visa petitions is a matter of controversy.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s an indication that tech hiring as a whole is picking up,” said H-1B opponent Kim Berry, president of the Programmers Guild. “Without knowing who is requesting or what skills they are requesting, it’s hard to say anything.”

The government won’t reveal those details until the end of the year, but several job market reports have confirmed a surge of tech hiring in the Bay Area.

Both President Barack Obama and his likely GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, have talked this year of the need to “staple” a green card to the diplomas of the best foreign students, ensuring they stay and contribute to the U.S. economy. Obama has not articulated any major changes to the H-1B program. Romney’s economic plan proposes raising the visa caps for highly skilled foreign workers.

Demand is not high enough to repeat what happened in 2007 and 2008, when the 65,000 visas available each year ran out in a few days and many more applicants lost out. That flood of petitions forced U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to dole out the visas in a lottery.

The recession temporarily ended the visa crunch, slowing recruitment to a trickle, although the cap has always been reached by the end of the year.

Sign to Congress

Lam said this year’s uptick signals a better economy but should also be a sign to Congress to make it easier for high-skilled workers to come here.

“The urgency is becoming more clear,” Lam said. “If we don’t do this now, those people will take the jobs elsewhere, and in the end, America’s going to lose out on something it’s always benefited from, which is the best and brightest wanting to come here.”

Berry disagrees, saying many companies recruit the workers because they are cheaper, not better, despite a rule requiring they be paid the prevailing wages.

“When you’re looking to pinch pennies, you can get an H-1B,” he said.

Unlike a green card, which allows permanent residency in the United States, an H-1B lasts for three years and can be extended to six. The visa is for professional workers in fields such as computer programming and medical work.

Silicon Valley companies including Intel, Oracle, Google, Apple and Hewlett-Packard rank among the top employers nationwide in the number of temporary foreign workers they sponsor. Several of those companies declined to comment about the issue this week.

But in a lobbying trip to the nation’s capital last month, sponsored by Lam’s group, dozens of Bay Area executives pushed lawmakers to expand high-skilled immigration — not just the temporary H-1B visa, but also visas that lead to permanent legal residency.

“They have been consistently calling for this for over a decade now,” Lam said. “A lot of these folks they’re trying to recruit have unique, singular skills.”

Along with the roughly 32,500 H-1B petitions that companies filed in the month since the April 2 start date, an additional 13,700 petitions have been filed for foreign workers with advanced degrees. Those H-1B visas don’t fall under the annual 65,000 cap; they have a separate 20,000 cap. The advanced-degree petitions also have nearly doubled over last year’s numbers.

Amid the recruitment spike, several lawmakers from both parties are appealing to Silicon Valley with bills for high-skilled immigrant workers, entrepreneurs or university graduates.

The latest came Tuesday when U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced legislation to add 55,000 permanent residency visas — the green cards — for foreign students who earn graduate degrees from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, known as the STEM fields. Many of those students must otherwise compete for H-1B sponsors after graduation if they want to stay.

Bipartisan appeal

To offset the added visas, Cornyn’s bill would eliminate the “diversity lottery” that randomly distributes 55,000 green cards to people from countries that do not have high rates of immigration to the United States.

Such proposals favoring highly educated immigrants have bipartisan appeal.

One advocate for lowering immigration said he would rather see fewer visas altogether but said Cornyn’s plan to allot them to students with master’s and doctorate degrees is better than distributing visas randomly.

“The visa lottery is a totally unjustified program, one of the stupidest ways you could pick immigrants,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. “This is clearly better than just adding those STEM visas and leaving the visa lottery in place.”

Berry was less supportive, arguing that Cornyn’s bill could lead to U.S. universities degenerating into visa mills.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group has not weighed in on Cornyn’s bill, but Lam said, “We are definitely for the concept of increasing the availability of visas and green cards” for science and technology graduates.