H1B visas still available for 2010: Another sign of the times

WSJ just reported that for the year 2010, H1B visas are still available….so all you international skilled workers – reach out to your potential employees and see if they knew about this and are more amenable to hiring you given your skill set than the next guy over. Also, not a bad time for  early stage entrepreneurs to see how they can hire the best of the best (technical talent) by employing foreigners. The difficulty in getting the due process completed may be much less now.

Contrast this to last year when these visas ran out within days. Yet another sign of the times we are living through. Not only are most firms not hiring, let alone hiring internationals who would need sponsorship (and associated legal fees/burden), but the availability of government funding (TARP, ARRA etc) also prohibit companies from hiring outside the US.

H-1B Visas Still Available for FY 2010

By Sara Murray

Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said Wednesday that it still has H-1B visas available for fiscal year 2010, a week after it began accepting applications from educated foreigners.

This contrasts with last year when the agency was immediately swamped with more than 160,000 applications for visas, said Eric Thomas, a spokesman for Compete America, a network of companies and organizations that promotes recruiting talent to maintain a competitive workforce.

For fiscal year 2010, which begins Oct. 1, 2009, USCIS can issue up to 20,000 H-1B visas to applicants with a master’s degree or higher and up to 65,000 additions visas to those with bachelor’s degrees or similar training. The agency began accepting applications on April 1.

A strange commonality between the beauties and the geeks

Strange but true….I know of a friend (classical opera singer) stuck in NYC without work since she is unable to get the required visa. (Source: The Economist)

Beauty and the Geek

A new bill proposes more visas be allocated to fashion models

IT’S not often that fashion models are paired with IT workers, except in the lurid fantasies of computer geeks. But because of a decision made back in 1990 they must compete for the same over-subscribed H-1B, a temporary work visa for specialised occupations. Until 2004, when the government lowered the cap on the number of H-1Bs it issued, it didn’t matter so much. But now demand has far outstripped the limited number of visas available, and many foreign models are being denied the chance to sashay down America’s catwalks.

Anthony Weiner, a New York congressman, wants to fix this tragic glitch. He has proposed a bill amending the rules so that the models will be reclassified into their own special immigration category. This would free up more visas for the nerds; and it would allow 1,000 models to strut their stuff in America each year, compared with just 349 in 2007, half the annual number admitted between 2000 and 2005.