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US doubles H-1B visa fees, tightens L-1 visa rules
The US is adopting a carrot-and-stick policy regarding its guest-worker programmes. While allowing 20,000 more H-1B visas, the US Congress has now doubled the visa fee to $2,000. It has also tightened provisions of the L-1 visa programme to prevent misuse.
You could triple the fees and they'd still come.
Several Indian tech companies have taken advantage of the L-1 visa route to move employees to US offices, particularly after the slash in the annual quota of H-1B visas from 195,000 to 65,000 beginning October 2003. The new measures, to be signed into law by President George Bush shortly, are designed to partially meet the concerns of American labour. The hike in H-1B visa fee includes a $500 "anti-fraud" provision. American companies will be required to attest that an H-1B worker will not displace a US worker.

The initiative to raise the number of H-1B visas and fix loopholes was taken by senator Saxby Chambliss and representative Lamar Smith, both Republicans, through separate Bills in the two Houses. The Bills were finally tucked into the Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was passed by Congress over the weekend. Both made out the case for reserving the additional 20,000 H-1B visas for foreign students passing out of US universities with master's or doctorate degrees — a move vigorously supported by the leading lights of US tech industry like Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments. "It's counterproductive to educate these students and then force them abroad to compete against us," says Sandra Boyd, who chairs the "Compete America" coalition that lobbied for the exemptions.
This will have a big impact on American biomedicine as well. Lots of researchers and physician trainees on H-1Bs.
About the changes in the L-1 visa programme, Chambliss maintained that these would help fix the problem of firms using these visas to act as "job shops" to bring in foreign workers and outsource them to third-party companies.
Posted by: Steve White 2004-11-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=49605