Crush of applicants for visas has firms fearing staff losses
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The news came to Medrad Tuesday night in an e-mail from the company's law firm. By 8:30 yesterday morning, managers had already convened an emergency meeting.
The problem: A crush of visa applications for skilled foreign workers might make it impossible for Medrad -- and other area companies -- to hire the workers the Indiana Township medical device maker says it needs.
Every year, the U.S. government allocates a certain number of temporary H-1B visas for companies to hire skilled foreign workers. The number of available visas, used on behalf of engineers, computer programmers and other highly skilled workers, is capped at 65,000 for the 2008 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, and the government started accepting applications Monday morning.
By Monday afternoon, 150,000 applications had already been submitted. To narrow those applications down to the 65,000 limit, applications will be chosen at random.
"We're scrambling around to figure out exactly who is on that level of a visa and who it may affect," said Andrew Ferraro, Medrad's manager of staffing and recruiting. "We view this as a serious problem."
Medrad currently has about 15 or 20 of its 1,250 Pittsburgh area workers using H1-B visas, and those who already have visas will not be affected by the cap on new visas. But employees working at Medrad under a one-year F-1 student visa would likely have to go back to their home countries if Medrad cannot secure visas in the random drawing, said Mr. Ferraro.
Furthermore, if the company can't reliably get those visas, he said, the company might think twice about hiring recent college graduates who might require one.
Every year since 2004, when the U.S. government slashed the cap on H1-B visas from 195,000 to 65,000, companies have hit the upper limit. Last year, though, it took two months for visa applications to reach 65,000 -- meaning that those who had prepared in advance were able to secure them.
The limit was lowered in part because all the visas were not being used in 2004, and in part to answer criticism that the visas enable companies to pay workers less than they would Americans, replace American workers with foreign workers and discourage U.S. citizens from pursuing careers in technology.
As the economy has picked up in recent years, technology company executives have unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to raise the cap.
Companies that are not selected in the upcoming random lottery for H1-B visas this year will have to wait until April of next year to reapply -- and those workers will then not be able to start working until October of 2009.
"We had been warning our clients for some time that it was a real possibility, but everybody was shocked to see that it actually did happen," said Matthew T. Phillips, an employment lawyer with Downtown-based Cohen & Grigsby who filed visa applications on behalf of many of his clients this year. "We're talking about a year and a half of being locked out."
The H1-B visas are thought of as being used predominantly by technology and engineering companies, but are also used by area hospitals, banks and manufacturing companies.
The visas are so essential, they say, because there just aren't qualified Americans to fill the jobs.
"If the numbers were available in the economy, no one would pay us to do this," said Mr. Phillips, noting that in addition to legal costs, companies pay thousands of dollars to the government for each visa application.
"The alternative is they leave and use that education and knowledge someplace else."
In Pittsburgh, Mr. Ferraro worries that the lack of visas might stunt growth at Medrad and other companies.
"There is a serious shortage of Americans going into engineering majors," he said.
"To find the top talent to grow our company, we want to hire the best, and we want to be able to get them visas."
First Published April 5, 2007 12:00 am
