Foreign Labor

As U.S. employers start applying today for visas for foreign workers, the hiring of talent from other countries is facing heightened scrutiny and the threat of greater restrictions as domestic unemployment soars. In recent years, the annual competition for 85,000 temporary work visas awarded to foreign computer technicians, engineers, university educators and other highly skilled professionals has drawn twice as many applications as spots available.

For foreign professionals in the United States, the rising unemployment rate is especially daunting. Laid-off foreign workers are scrambling for temporary visas and seeking advice from immigration attorneys about how long they can legally stay in the country while hunting for jobs. Even some foreigners here on visas or work permits are switching employers, fearing that an unstable job during a recession could lead to a one-way ticket home or end their chance of getting a green card.

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. "Our immigration system makes it very difficult for U.S.

Maliwan Clinton recalls her first taste of America with a shudder. In this fabled land of the free, she was enslaved behind razor wire and around-the-clock guards in an El Monte sweatshop, where she and more than 70 other Thai laborers were forced to work 18-hour days for what amounted to less than a dollar an hour.

If you prefer a customer service agent who speaks "American," then computer maker Dell Inc. has a deal for you. Catering to consumers put off by the accents of India, the Philippines and other call-center hubs around the globe, Dell will guarantee -- for a price -- that the person who picks up the phone on a support call will be, as company ads state in bold text, "based in North America." The Your Tech Team service, with agents located in the U.S., costs $12.

As it prepares to leave office, the Bush administration is moving to make it easier for U.S. farming companies to hire foreign workers, which farmworker groups say will worsen wages and working conditions. The farmworker groups said changes to the H2A visa program, used by the agriculture industry to hire temporary workers, were posted on the Labor Department's website at midnight Tuesday but later taken down.

Thirty-one people, most of them Turkish construction workers, were killed Tuesday when their chartered plane crashed in heavy fog while trying to land in Iraq, Turkish and Iraqi officials said. The cause of the crash near Balad, about 50 miles north of the capital, was unclear. A Turkish Foreign Ministry official said the pilot aborted an initial attempt to land because of heavy fog, then crashed on a second attempt.

Gunmen stormed a compound housing expatriate pipeline workers in Nigeria's oil-rich southern region, kidnapping nine South Koreans and a Nigerian, officials said. Dozens of soldiers and security guards at the complex failed to foil the latest in a series of kidnappings in the area, said Ekiyor Wilson, a local government spokesman. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Copernicus Airport. 12:52 p.m. A former Polish soldier arrives from Ireland, where he waits tables and studies computers. He shimmies through customs and tows his suitcases out sliding glass doors, just as two lovers with new passports step to the ticket counter for a flight to the British Midlands and jobs in a cookie factory. Babies wail, duffel bags zip shut, tears fall on winter coats. Every day is like this. Poles come and go, ferried across Europe on budget airlines to new, unsure lives.

Gunmen demanding a ransom kidnapped an American engineer and a British engineer on their way to work in Nigeria's southern oil city of Port Harcourt, authorities said. The abduction brings to 29 the number of foreign workers held by armed groups in the remote swamps of the Niger Delta. Diplomats said the two men worked for local construction firm Pivot. A security source said the kidnappers demanded $11.7 million.