H-IB Visa bill goes down the drain

The collapse of immigration reform in Washington DC is a setback for efforts to liberalize current H-1B visa policies, which would allow high-tech organizations to bring in talent from abroad to handle projects for which it is difficult to find staff.  The H-1B cap for the federal government's next fiscal year was already met on the first day that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting visa applications in April. The USCIS received about 150,000 applications that day, and that strong demand for visas makes a compelling case for why an increase in the cap is urgently needed, according to Robert Hoffman, vice president of government and public affairs at Oracle. As a result, the high-tech sector is now looking at other options for pursuing an increase in the visa cap, according to various policy analysts within the IT industry. Option one for H-1B proponents, according to CIO Magazine, is a piece of stand-alone legislation called the Securing Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership Act (or the Skill Bill)--which would raise the cap to 115,000 visas and would provide market-based mechanisms for further hikes. Option two: increasing the cap through an amendment to a spending bill. That approach has worked in the past.
Option three: adding an H-1B provision to one of a number of bills that Congress is already considering as part of the Democratic majority's Innovation Agenda.

For more on the current state of H-1B reform:
- read the detailed analysis in CIO Article