Google Asks Congress To Increase H-1B Visas Cap

Jun 7, 2007 at 9:39am ET by Barry Schwartz

A Google Blog post explains Google’s recent initiatives to influence congress to increase the H-1B visas annual cap of 65,000. Google said it has prevented 70 Google candidates from receiving H-1B visas in the past year.

Google reportedly received 133,000 visa applications filed by H-1B candidates in the first two quarters this year alone. Google argues to have a cap at 65,000 of these visas does not take into account the “the growth rate of our technology-driven economy.” Laszlo Bock, our Vice President of People Operations, testified at House Judiciary Subcommittee yesterday with this message. The Google Blog captured it on video and put it on their blog.

News.com has additional coverage of Laszlo’s testimony.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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2 COMMENTS ON Google Asks Congress To Increase H-1B Visas Cap

Michael Martinez, June 7th, 2007 at 12:17 pm ET:

Bill Gates made a similar suggestion a couple of years ago.

With the hundreds of thousands of American IT professionals who have lost their jobs because of obsalence, one must ask why these large companies with deep pockets would not be willing to devote some of that relocation expense to retraining people who already have considerable technical skills.

CPCcurmudgeon, June 10th, 2007 at 9:52 pm ET:

For that matter, they may not even need to retrain most of the American IT professionals who were laid off. It just may be a matter of letting them learn on the job. But the way (at least) some IT interviews are conducted, it’s more important to answer bits of IT trivia than display one’s ability to learn something on the job.

IMHO, too many companies have swallowed the “A good hire can’t help you more than a bad hire can hurt you” hype.

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