Monday, September 18, 2000 - Clinton: Congress May Boost Visas
By WILLIAM C. MANN, Associated Press WriterWASHINGTON (AP) - President Clinton predicted Saturday that Congress will increase the number of visas for foreign high-tech workers before the end of the current session and indicated he would sign the legislation.
Speaking to reporters from India, origin of many of the so-called H1B visitors, Clinton said a major question remaining is how many more than the current 115,000 a year will be allowed in.
H1B visas allow skilled workers to enter the United States for specified periods to do specific jobs for which employers say American workers are unavailable.
The technology industry says the need is as high as 300,000 a year. Labor unions object to the concept, contending that the high-tech industry recruits overseas mainly to hire a less expensive work force than Americans.
``The number of H1B visas will be increased in this Congress, I believe. I'll be quite surprised if it isn't,'' Clinton said.
``There's no question that we're going to increase the visas.''
The next Congress begins in January.
A long-pending Senate bill would increase the number of visas for each of the next three years to 200,000 a year. Otherwise, the 115,000 falls to 107,500 in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 and 65,000 a year after that.
The bill ran into problems this year when Clinton said in May that any visa increase had to be linked to changes in immigration policies mainly involving Hispanics. Republican leaders insist the two questions have nothing to do with each other and should be considered separately.
Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., the Senate Majority leader, acted Friday to bring a long-pending visa bill to a vote as early as Tuesday.
In his comments Saturday, Clinton did not mention the Hispanic question or any other links.
``The issue is how much will it be increased by and can we use the occasion of increasing the quotas to get some more funds from the companies that are hiring people for the training of our own people,'' the president said. He said they ``could also do these jobs - the people who are already here - if they had training.''
Lott's spokesman, John Czwartacki, welcomed the president's comments, although he said a lot of time has been wasted on the bill.
``We've been trying to take it out for months now, but the Democrats in Congress have been inventing all kinds of reasons why it couldn't come out. The real reason was their labor friends didn't like it,'' Czwartacki said.
``If the president is signaling his support for us, we welcome that and view that as a positive development, albeit at the 11th hour.''
The bill is S. 2045.
