[Not mentioned in this story: Infogain pays its H-1B programmers an average of $42,000]

Published Wednesday, July 26, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News


Tech visas bogged down
Increase gets mired in election politics; firms sound warning
BY JIM PUZZANGHERA AND K. OANH HA
Mercury News

WASHINGTON -- Legislation to increase the number of visas available for skilled foreign workers, once on a fast track to approval under strong pressure from the high-tech industry, now will not get through Congress until at least September because it has become deeply entangled in election-year politics.

Thrown into the chaos of the final days of a legislative session in the weeks before a tight presidential election, the legislation to boost the number of so-called H-1B visas is in danger of being delayed until next year. But key congressional backers and high-tech officials remain confident that Congress and the White House will find a way to deliver on one of Silicon Valley's top legislative priorities this year.

``We're absolutely confident the votes are there'' to pass an increase, said William Archey, president of the American Electronics Association. ``We're getting caught in election-year stuff.''

Silicon Valley executives have argued they need more foreign workers to fill vacancies in the booming high-tech industry. This year's allotment of 115,000 H-1B visas was reached in March, six months before the end of the fiscal year. Proposals in the House of Representatives and Senate would nearly double that allotment to about 200,000 a year over the next three years.

But House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, on Tuesday confirmed what many in Silicon Valley had feared recently -- the House legislation will not be voted on before Congress breaks for its summer recess at the end of the week.

The Senate is still trying to bring its legislation up for a vote this week. But the failure of the House to act before its members leave town for the political conventions means the legislation will have to be approved in the most hectic and unpredictable time of the year in Washington -- fall of an election year.

As Congress rushes to pass a budget and finish its work so members can go home to campaign for re-election, it's often hard to pass controversial legislation. And Silicon Valley executives have warned that should Congress fail to increase the number of H-1B visas, many projects will have to be delayed or scrapped because of a lack of manpower.

The delay is limiting the growth of some companies, said Kapil Nanda, chief executive of Infogain Corp., a Los Gatos consulting firm. Nanda estimates that his company, which accepts projects on contract from local companies, has lost between $3 million and $5 million this year in projects that would have been worked on by H-1B staff. This year Infogain has hired more than 100 engineers on H-1B visas, and an additional 50 are in the pipeline because Infogain can't get the special visas.


Recruiting difficulty

Nanda fears the delay might cost the company talented workers.

``Not getting those visas has definitely hindered our growth,'' said Nanda. ``The uncertainty makes it difficult to recruit people and give them a kind of time frame of when we can hire them. By the time we get to them they may have moved on. These are people with lots of options.''

With the backlog of people waiting for visas, Nanda said the company probably won't be able to bring in visa workers until the winter.

``We're talking about years of backlog,'' said Tracy Koon, Intel Corp.'s director of corporate affairs. ``It's like that scene in Indiana Jones running with the big rock behind him. The backlog has gotten bigger and bigger and more difficult to deal with.''

The H-1B legislation needs to surmount more than just the hectic final days of a legislative session. The issue has become enmeshed in the battle for control of the House of Representatives and the fight for Latino votes in the November elections.

In addition, the industry was hoping early passage of the bill would help alleviate one of the problems with the visa program. For the past few years, the visa allotment has been reached early in the fiscal year, causing applications to stockpile awaiting the new allotment when the next fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.

Backers of the H-1B visa increase this year planned to try to add thousands more visas into the current fiscal year to erase that backlog. But with final approval not even possible before September at the earliest, its unlikely the law could be enacted before the 2000 fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

Things seemed to be moving along smoothly this spring, with key committees in the House and Senate approving visa increases. But the main factor in the process grinding to a halt was a White House proposal on May 11 that injected two immigration issues important to Latinos into the legislation.


`This is a big deal issue'

One proposal would extend a current immigration amnesty provision for Nicaraguans and Cubans to others from Latin America. The second, known as late amnesty, would allow illegal immigrants who entered the United States before 1986 to apply to become U.S. citizens. A similar amnesty was passed in the 1980s.

Republicans charged that Democrats wanted to tack on unrelated items to the H-1B bill just to force the GOP to turn them down and look bad in the eyes of Latinos. Democrats, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, a chief sponsor of one of the visa increase bills, said the Latino issues are immigration related and should be considered with the H-1B bill.

``This is a big deal issue,'' she said. ``Maybe the Republicans didn't know that, but it is a huge issue in the Latino community all over America. I didn't make that happen.''

Still, Lofgren and five other House Democrats said in a letter to Rep. David Dreier, R-Covina, a key sponsor of one of the visa bills, that Republicans drop the Latino issues in order to get a vote on the H-1B increase. But Republicans criticized the tone of the letter as highly partisan and said they are seeking a bipartisan spirit before moving forward.