US Work Visas

It became apparent to me today that our visa program needs a complete overhaul. The Jackson Hole News and Guide has an interesting article that outlines the problems with the H2-B visa. This visa is geared towards low wadge workers and is used heavily in the service industry. Every season staffing the service jobs in JH becomes more of a challenge. As we near summer the help wanted ads grow due to the lack of potential employees. The current visa situation seems to be a mess and a number of local businesses are concerned that they wont be able to hire any employees through H2-B visas. The problem seems to stem from the "red tape" and slow government response.

On the flip side, the H1 visa program is in even deeper dire straights. The government places a quota of around 125,000 visas per year. The 2007 quota was filled before the close of the first day when applications were accepted. The H1 visa is focused towards knowledge workers - people with college educations - and it's popular in the technology and science fields. At the close of the second day of receiving applications the government tally topped 200,000. Thus a lottery was put in place and people were chosen at random to receive the H1 visas.

I hope that Congress can put politics aside and reform our H1 & H2 immigration programs. This is a challenging and contentious issue, but it obviously needs to be vastly improved. If not, we stand to loose our global competitiveness in the research and IT industries and our service economy (which grows in importance every year) may also be harmed.