Visa Forces US Firms to Relocate Abroad

"When I hire an Indian PhD today, I hire him in Bangalore, not San Jose," T.J. Rodgers, chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor Corp, told Reuters.

"Now I can hire all I want and not have to worry about the vagaries of government decrees. They've made it less tenable to do business here, so we do business elsewhere."

This week, a record of 150,000 skilled workers applied for visa to work in the US under the H-1B visa program.

The US government will grant only 65,000 H-1B visas this fiscal year to people with at least the equivalent of an undergraduate degree and expertise in a specialized field such as engineering or computer programming.

An additional 20,000 visas are reserved for those with advanced academic degrees.

That quota is "woefully inadequate," warned Ted Ruthizer, head of the business immigration practice for New York law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis and Frankel.

"I think everybody was caught off guard. It's a mess."

Jack Krumholtz, head of Microsoft's Washington, D.C. office, said US companies are now turning to off-shore.

"If we're not able to hire these people, it puts increasing pressure on us and other companies to do that work abroad," he said.

"It has the perverse impact of encouraging off-shoring."

Closures

The imbalance between granted visas for foreign skilled workers and the market needs also force small businesses to shut down.

"The problem, obviously, is that not every company has that ability to relocate people overseas," said Robert Hoffman, vice president of government affairs for business software maker Oracle Corp.

"A lot of small companies rely on H-1Bs," added Hoffman, who is also co-chair of Compete America, an industry group that advocates easier rules on foreign workers.

"A lot of companies were started by those who were here on H-1Bs."

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