WASHINGTON (AP) — Businesses seeking highly skilled
workers from overseas took less than a week to snap up all 85,000 visas
available for next year, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
announced Monday.
The agency had been accepting applications just
since April 1 for the 2015 fiscal year quota of the highly coveted H-1B
visas, which are used for computer programmers, engineers and other
skilled workers employed in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
It’s
no surprise that the cap was reached quickly. That’s happened
repeatedly in recent years and is a key issue that drove business
executives to lobby for comprehensive immigration reform.
The
far-reaching immigration bill that passed the Senate last year included a
major increase in H-1B visas along with other changes making it easier
to bring skilled workers to the U.S.
But with that legislation
stalled in the Republican-led House, some high-tech leaders have
recently made pleas to lawmakers to at least increase H-1B visas. That’s
led to some concern among supporters of the Senate bill that high-tech
leaders are focusing on their own priorities and abandoning their
commitment to comprehensive legislation that includes a path to
citizenship for some 11 million immigrants now here illegally.
Sen.
Dick Durbin, D-Ill., an author of the Senate bill, sent a letter to
high-tech chief executives last week asking them to renew their
commitment to comprehensive legislation and chiding, "This ‘divide and
conquer’ approach destroys the delicate political balance achieved in
our bipartisan bill and calls into question the good faith of those who
would sacrifice millions of lives for H-1B relief."
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