Companies cannot give H-1B numbers

A letter in today's Si Valley paper says:

H-1B visas driven by desire, not need

It is often stated that this nation is in dire need of highly skilled foreign workers. How would we know that? A recent article in the Mercury News (Page 1A, July 15) interviewed a number of people regarding H-1B visas. Among them were representatives for Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Interestingly, none of them were able to state the number of visas needed. State and federal representatives were just as ill-informed.

Filing multiple visa applications for the same position or applying for an over-estimated number of visas suggests that the companies first get as many H-1B visa employees as they can and then fill the rest with the locals. Perhaps this is not the way the program should be used.

Zoltan Lukman
Santa Clara

He's right. The companies just want cheap labor. If the foreigners were really filling a labor shortage, then the jobs would go unfilled when the H-1B quotas are filled. But no, the companies are always able to hire local engineers when they cannot get the H-1B visas.