April Fools for Skilled Workers

My latest oped is up on National Review Online today. I return to a theme I've often written about over the years, the inanities of U.S. immigration system:

Quite appropriately, today exposes another facet of the foolishness that is U.S. immigration policy. April 1st is the day each fiscal year when employers are allowed to begin filing petitions with the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly the INS) for highly skilled workers to be given what are known as H-1B visas.

H-1Bs allow employers to hire foreign workers in certain professional occupations. They are good for three years and can be renewed for another three. Though an H-1B cannot lead to a green card — so the foreign professional is tied to one employer and has to leave the country after a maximum of six years of being a productive member of society — it’s still a pretty good deal.

The problem is that, even in this apparent economic downturn, there aren’t enough of these visas: Congress limits the number of H-1Bs that can be granted each year, and that magic number has been set at 65,000 for five years now. Before that, and in response to the technology boom of the late ‘90s, Congress temporarily raised the H-1B cap to 195,000. But that expansion expired in 2004, and the cap has been reached earlier and earlier each year since.

As they say, read the whole thing.