A new bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate on Tuesday would increase the number of guest worker visas allocated to the tech industry, despite an already over-saturated job market, The Hill reported.
Called the Immigration Innovation Act, the bill is sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.; Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Chris Coons, D-Del.; and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The bill, which failed to move in Congress after its first introduction in 2013, is in response to a major demand from Silicon Valley firms, who say that current law prevents them from hiring enough high-skilled foreign programmers to meet increasing demands.
"It's a commonsense approach to ensuring that those who have come here to be educated in high-tech fields have the ability to stay here with their families and contribute to the economy and our society," Senator Hatch said in a statement.
"I'm calling on everyone - the President, members of both parties, and stakeholders in the tech community - to support this bill and help make it the first step towards real immigration reform," he said. "We must find make concrete progress to solve some of the many critical problems facing our nation. I-Squared is an obvious solution to an undeniable need, and I want to work with everyone to get it done now."
Current law limits the number of high-skilled foreign worker H-1B visas to 65,000 per year, but tech companies have long lobbied Congress to increase that number, and the newly introduced bill would raise it to 115,000, according to The Hill.
However, studies have shown that there is already a surplus of American high-tech workers.
A Center for Immigration Studies report released in May 2014 found that from 2007-2012, employment in the science, technology, engineering and math fields "averaged only 105,000 jobs annually," while about 129,000 immigrants currently live in the U.S. and hold degrees in one of those fields, Breitbart reported.
CBS News reported in July of last year, citing statistics from an American Community Survey, that "only about half of engineering, computer, math and statistics majors in the U.S. had jobs in their chosen field."
In Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., recently released immigration roadmap for the new Republican Congress, the senator noted that "a stunning 3 in 4 Americans with a STEM degree do not hold a job in a STEM field-that's a pool of more than 11 million Americans with STEM qualifications who lack STEM employment," Breitbart noted.
He added that the "true number of guest workers admitted to the U.S. each year solely for the purpose of filling coveted jobs in the IT and STEM fields is actually much larger than news reports would suggest," since there are ways to get around the caps, according to Sessions, who said that he understands why corporations would push for legislation that "will flood the labor market and keep pay low."
Even President Barack Obama has voiced skepticism at tech companies that claim there is a shortage of American workers.
"I'm generally skeptical when you hear employers say, 'oh we just can't find any Americans to do the job,'" Obama said last December at an immigration event in Nashville. "A lot of times what they really mean is that it's a lot cheaper to potentially hire somebody who has just come here before they know better..."
