The positive news Jan. 9 of the declining U.S. unemployment rate (5.6 percent, a six-year low, according to the Department of Labor) does have one discouraging prognostication for employers hoping to hire specialty occupation workers on H-1B visas this year. Strong economic growth, coupled with a lack of any meaningful business immigration reform, suggests that the perpetually oversubscribed H-1B quota will be exhausted for the next federal fiscal year (FY 2016) within the first days of the filing period, which begins April 1. Private-sector employers have begun the annual petition preparation cycle with the expectation that they will have less than a 50 percent chance of being able to go through with their desired H-1B hires, even when they file on the first available date.

The H-1B visa is used to bring experienced professionals from abroad, and to hire international students from our local universities, most often in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields that are vital for maintaining competitiveness in the world economy. The H-1B visa is an employer-sponsored visa for “specialty occupation” jobs—defined as positions that normally require a minimum of a bachelor's degree or higher in a specific field. This is the visa for professionals—software developers, industrial engineers, financial analysts and pharmaceutical researchers, among others. While foreign-owned and multinational companies may have other visa options they can use, the H-1B is the only visa available to American companies that have no operations outside the United States.

An annual quota of 65,000 new H-1B nonimmigrants per year was established more than 20 years ago, in 1990. One aim of this cap was to protect the U.S. workforce. And, at that time, the 65,000 quota was sufficient to meet demand. However, in the second half of the 1990s, the need for H-1B workers in occupations such as information technology, teaching, medicine, engineering, finance and marketing far exceeded the annual 65,000 quota. This resulted in employers being unable to hire foreign national workers to meet the huge demand in these and other specialty professions during the last several months of the government fiscal year. American business and competitiveness suffered.