'H1Bs visas must be hiked'

Making a case for revising the H1B visas upwards, the US Commerce Secretary has said high-tech businesses are facing shortages in filling up positions and lamented that students from India and China cannot stay here and apply their skills.

Secretary of Commerce Carlos Guttierrez made the point in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee that was having Comprehensive Immigration reform as its topic of hearings when the issue of the H1B visas came up for a brief discussion.

"... Just on the issue of high-skilled workers, what I hear very often from businesses in the high-tech field and other fields where they cannot fill their high-skilled engineering, science-based jobs as quickly or as readily as they would like," the Commerce Secretary said.

"We have students come over from the world: India, China, primarily. They get the best education money can buy, and then they have to go back home; they can't stay here and apply their skills. We believe that we should be able to do better than that in order to serve our competitiveness needs as a nation," Guttierrez said agreeing with a Republican law maker that the current quotas on the H-1Bs need to be revised upwards.

Guttierrez was responding to a statement by Republican Senator Orin Hatch of Utah who called for the H1B visa programme to be revisited as a part of the comprehensive overhaul of the immigration laws of America.

"The Chinese are educating 300,000 engineers a year. We educate 60,000, half of whom are foreigners, and many of whom then go home to their countries and educate their people in competition with us where they would love to stay here and work as maybe not citizens, but at least as people who have the credentials to work," Senator Hatch observed.

"I think (Microsoft founder) Bill Gates is absolutely right on that. And we need to up those figures. But every time we try to up the figures on the H-1B -- Ph.D. engineers and scientists and others that are going to be crucial to keep our country moving ahead -- we then have the other side coming out and saying we're being unfair because you're taking care of them but you're not taking care of the average person.

"How are we going to balance that? Because I personally believe we've got to expand the H-1B program, as Gates and almost everybody in the high-tech world believes.

And then, of course, at the same time, do some reasonable things without granting amnesty, and having people earn their right to citizenship the way you've been talking here today," the senior lawmaker said.

The issue of H1B visas was a part of the Senate package on Immigration reform in the 109th Congress which failed to get anywhere as Republican and Democratic law makers could not get into a Conference on widely varying Immigration bills that came out of the House of Representatives and Senate.

Law makers in the 110th Congress are a long way off from any agreement on a comprehensive package but the Senate version in the 109th Congress had called for nearly doubling the current levels of H1B's from the current 65,000 annual cap and yearly increases.

The version of Immigration Bill that cleared the House last Congress had virtually nothing on the H1B visas.