US senators question nine Indian firms on H1-B visas

Washington: With outsourcing becoming an election issue, two United States senators have questioned 25 top H1-B visa users, including nine Indian firms, about their recruitment process for professional workers. "The H-1B programme can't be allowed to become a job-killer in America," Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Chuck Grassley said in a letter to the top 25 firms that used nearly 20,000 of the 65,000 available H-1B visas in 2007

 

"We need to ensure that firms are not misusing these visas, causing American workers to be unfairly deprived of good high-skill jobs at home," they said in the letter sent on April 1, the day the US Citizenship and Immigration Services began receiving H-1B visa applications for fiscal year 2009 beginning on October 1, 2008.

 

"By the end of the day today, all of the H-1B visas for the year will likely be spoken for," Durbin and Grassley said, suggesting "that the loopholes in the H-1B and L-1 visa programmes are allowing for the outsourcing of American jobs". Grassley said that he has no doubt that we'll hear arguments all day as to why the cap on H-1B visas should be raised, but nobody should be fooled.

 

"The bottom line is that there are highly skilled American workers being left behind, searching for jobs that are being filled by H-1B visa holders," Grassley said. "It's time to close the loopholes that have allowed this to happen and enact real reform."

 

The senators' campaign comes even as two recent studies by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) point out that H-1B visas that bring in foreign professionals, including a large number from India, are creating jobs in the US.

 

The senators said that the letters to companies are part of an effort to determine if the H-1B programme is being used for its intended purpose - to fill a worker shortage for a temporary time period. Durbin and Grassley said that they expect the companies to cooperate and answer their questions to ensure that accurate information is being used to address future reforms of the programme.

 

The H-1B visa programme allows American companies to employ temporary foreign workers in "speciality occupations", often in the high tech industry, while the L visa programme is for intra-company transfers of managers, executives and specialists.(IANS)