WASHINGTON — Driven crazy by U.S. immigration policy, Microsoft Corp. executives decided to drive some of their employees north.
Unable to land enough visas for a third of the foreign-born engineers and computer scientists it wanted to hire -- many of them newly minted graduates of U.S. universities -- the Redmond, Wash., company opened a software development center just over the Canadian border last year. About 150 people now work in Vancouver.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, April 01, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 62 words Type of Material: Correction
Foreign visas: A headline on a Business section story Monday about the shortage of visas for foreign-born engineers and computer scientists said that U.S. firms were opening sites abroad to overcome the problem and that some planned multiple filings. Although some companies filed multiple applications for each potential candidate last year, U.S. officials closed that loophole this year, as the story indicated.
"Our immigration system makes it very difficult for U.S. firms to hire highly skilled foreign workers," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told the House Science and Technology Committee this month as he pleaded for more visas. "At a time when talent is the key to economic success, it makes no sense to educate people in our universities, often subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, and then insist that they return home."
Frustrated by the limited number of these so-called H-1B visas awarded each spring in a random lottery to highly skilled foreigners, U.S. technology executives have tried to find ways around the problem while lobbying aggressively to increase the annual cap.
Microsoft, Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and other large companies have opened or expanded research facilities outside the United States. And some companies have resorted to gaming the system: filing multiple applications, along with the $1,570 to $3,320 filing fee, for each potential hire to boost the odds of winning one of the coveted visas. The fee is higher for large companies and for expedited filings.
"You can imagine our frustration," said Robert Hoffman, vice president of government affairs at Oracle Corp., which, like Microsoft, insisted it has not filed duplicate applications. "We have 1,000 job openings at Oracle we can't fill because of the arbitrary nature of visas and the arbitrary way they are selected."
Efforts to increase the annual allotment of visas have become entangled in the even more volatile debate over border security and immigration reform that is stalled in Congress as well as by some lawmakers' belief that jobs are being taken from U.S. workers.
"This is an outsourcing visa," said Kim Berry, president of the Programmers Guild, a Summit, N.J.-based advocacy group that opposes more H-1B visas. Berry said it's cheaper for companies to hire new foreign college graduates than older U.S. workers.
