The news that the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued more than 20,000 H1-B non-immigrant visas than it was legally authorized to do in the Government's 1999 fiscal year should not surprise anyone. It is at least good news for some of the analog engineers who made it in those numbers. Isn't it?

H1-B visas are continually in the news; under industry pressure -- mostly from the electronics sector -- there are now 115,000 visas authorized by Congress for the next two fiscal years (starting this month.) But these non-immigrant visas for highly-qualified people are also shadowed in controversy. Some say that they steal jobs from qualified Americans, others talk of the holders being underpaid for doing the same jobs as citizens. The truth is probably a mix of both situations: And as the visa is attached to a particular employer, rather than a person, the employee is in a kind of "indentured" "slave-like" position.

Most H1-B visa holders want to stay in the U.S. They are not supposed to say that and the general advice from immigration attornies is that a holder not even try to start the process of converting (adjusting in INS parlance) to an immigrant status for at least a year. It all starts with the completion of a form at the street level of a Federal building . . .

. . . And as the months, and sometimes yars pass the case moves up floors to the top floor of the Federal building. The lucky, prepared, patient get through; the careless, impatient, unqualified can end up below street level in the detention cells. There is literally nothing that can be done by the average applicant or attorney to speed things up. (The same happens later on for immigrants who go through the naturalization process; it can be two years from application to interview.)

These time delays are dependent on the city used for the application and, presumably, the number of applicants. The staff involved seem to really try at getting things done but the conflicting laws and regulations do not help them one little bit. But when it comes to the moment of approval the actual process takes about 15 seconds with a signature and thumb print; the actual Green Card (which is, of course, not green) arrives some weeks later.

The IEEE has been vocal (http://www.ieee.org/releases/991020pr.html) in an open letter to the White House that more H1-B applications should be dealt with by using the immigrant processes instead. It feels that the 20,000 error last year should be converted into Green Cards: Certainly that is a great deal better than some absurd attempt to correct the numbers by taking visas away! But there is no fair way of choosing those people. In future years in an ideal world that might be great way of doing it. But ask a high-tech employer whether it is happy to wait two years for the process to be completed and you can imagine the response you are likely to get.

I am all in favor of the Green Card chain being speeded up but that may not be the opinion at all high-tech companies; after all, your quasi-slave is suddenly employer-mobile.

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