senator

November 5th is rapidly approaching us. With so much talk in the news lately about the difference in opinions between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, I thought it would be good to address an issue that they both have similar views on – they both support argument that H1B Visa’s issued in the United States per year to be expanded.

Like Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, both Senator McCain and Senator Obama believe that the current immigration system is broken and needs to be reworked.

“The time to fix our broken immigration system is now… We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace… But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America… Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should”
— Barack Obama, Statement on U.S. Senate Floor, May 23, 2007

According to and article on Network World, over 150,000 petitions for H1B Visas were submitted in 2008, but the government only honored and issued 65,000.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch interviewed Barack Obama. They talked about his views on Technology and what his views on expanding the H1B cap were. Some of his views are posted below:

1. He supports a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively.
2. He supports comprehensive immigration reform that includes improvement in our visa programs, including our legal permanent resident visa programs and temporary programs including the H-1B program, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.
3. He believes we should allow immigrants who earn their degrees in the U.S. to stay, work, and become Americans over time.
4. He believes that as part of our comprehensive reform, we should examine our ability to replace a stopgap increase in the number of H1B visas with an increase in the number of permanent visas we issue to foreign skilled workers.
5. He believes that we must fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.

On John McCain’s website he lists similar ideas:

1. Ensure high skilled workers trained and educated in the United States have the opportunity to stay and work in the United States upon graduation.
2. Reform caps for H-1B visa program to rise and fall in response to market conditions. Reduce bureaucracy and waiting times for workers to arrive in the United States.
3. Increase available green card numbers to reflect employer and employee demand.
4. Extend the ability for H-1B visa holders to renew their H-1B status while waiting for their green card number to become available.
5. Ensure available and qualified American workers are given adequate and fair opportunities to apply for available positions.

Along with expanding the total amount of Visa’s issued, the government also needs to create a stricter policy on checking applications and issuing the visa’s only to those 100% qualified. BusinessWeek recently posted an article stating a study which found 13% of the visa petitions for U.S. employers to bring in skilled foreign workers were fraudulent. Cases included applicants which the visa worker was not working or had never worked at the specified location on the application, and the job duties were significantly different from the position listed on the visa petition. This means that out of the 65,000 granted applications, 8,450 of them could have gone to actual qualified candidates.

With these changes and stricter policies in place it will help bring skilled workers to the United States and make us more competitive with other countries.

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