WASHINGTON, OCT 4: The US Senate on Tuesday passed legislation that will provide for 600,000 new visas over the next three years for skilled foreign workers, mainly to meet the demand from country's exploding high-tech industry.The Bill, which passed 96-1 in the 100-member Senate, will allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to issue up to 200,000 six-year temporary H1-B visas annually for the next three years to foreign workers. This is up from 115,000 last year and 65,000 in the year before.A majority of these visas are expected to go to Indian software programmers and engineers. In previous years, Indians snagged up to 50 per cent of the visas.The increased quota, which will come into effect only after the House concurs or compromises with the Senate, will immediately meet the demands of the high-tech industry that is said to be crucially short of technical hands and minds.High-tech firms say some 300,000 jobs are going unfilled for lack of qualified workers while thousands of aspirants for the posts are waiting in India, China and elsewhere because last year's quota has expired. ``The short-term problem is how to fill the key positions immediately so that we don't lose opportunities to foreign competitors or so that wedon't force American businesses to move offshore to where skilled workers might live,'' Senator Spencer Abraham, one of the key movers of the Bill, said. However, members of the House have moved two different pieces of legislation. One Bill would completely lift the quota system, allowing any number of workers to come in. But in return companies employing foreign workers have to guarantee a minimum salary of at least $ 40,000, prove that they are not depriving Americans of the same jobs, and pay towards the training of Americans.Software companies, particularly bodyshoppers who profitably bring in the ``indentured techno-serfs'' - as one writer called the H1-B workers - are opposed to this legislation.A separate House Bill contains language similar to the Senate legislation. The House and the Senate will have to reconcile their respective Bills to allow the new quota to kick in.
