Great post. Hopefully the escalator is removed in committee. Also, there are no improvements to the definition of prevailing wage.

What would the bill to address fraud and companies who don't play by the rules? We need not only new rules - but money set aside for the enforcement of the rules. Random audits are a must.

I wouldn't be happy with a higher cap, but I could live with it if ALL of the Durbin/Grassley provisions were included.

And why 50 employees? I think that no company should have 50% of their employees on the H-1b visa. Microsoft and Intel don't come close to that number, and they are the largest domestic users of the program. Have a percent that really means something.

I don't think the bill goes nearly far enough. Why allow the 1000's of bodyshops of 49 workers or less be 100% H-1b? How was this exception arrived at?

While it claims to stop outsourcing, i believe it still allows the biggest outsourcers, Infosys, Wipro, TCS, to continue business as usual (40% H-1b and 50% L-1 -- all paid way below U.S. wages)

One thing that often gets lost in this debate, is that even if there were a shortage, which I submit there is not, what long-term gain do we get by training non-citizens to work here for awhile and then take their skills elsewhere. Would it not be better to bite the bullet in the short-term and get the skills up of the Americans already here?

Finally, I cannot help but wonder about the dark desires of the NSA and other shadowy government agencies wiretapping and datamining the American populace. Americans know their rights and often stand for them. Would the whistleblower that revealed the huge computer room ATT gave to the NSA be blowing the whistle if he was a non-citizen subject to deportation.
~aw

so....after all of the abuse is cleaned up, we'll need a doubling of H-1b with an escalator clause

we don't need to worry about whether the laws will be properly enforced, I asked a number of people if they are happy about the way immigration laws are enforced, and they all said 'yes'

although I did ask the question, in SPANISH!

You're just fooling yourself. The fix is in and business owns DC. Nothing will pass that is even in the slightest way contrary to what corporations want to see.

You can count on Congress to fold, spindle, and mutilate this bill until all of the good parts are rung out and all that is left is the endless and unlimited increases.

Mark Twain was right when he said "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session."

It would have been much better if it had reduced the numbers of visas to 1,000 per year.

The prohibition against body shopping will be gamed within days of passage. Any prevailing compensation requirements will also be avoided. And it will be even worse because it will be made even worse in committee.

But a hard and lower cap, eliminating all of the exemptions, would help ensure that only the best and brightest received the visas, would help prevent under-payment to the visa-holder and subsequent under-payment to US citizen workers, and it would give the hundreds of thousands of displaced US citizen workers a shot at striving back toward full employment. The current bill undermines all of that.

The bill is crap for Americans. Lowering the prevailing wage and supporting academia is the primary purpose of this bill. Everything else will disappear or not be enforced. I love the fact that we're flooding the schools with foreigners, paying for them with our taxes (can you say NSF) training them in industry and then sending them home with disasterous consequences for US citizens.

Solution
1. Reducing the H1-B's will directly affect salaries which in turn will increase the number of students pursuing technology

2. Dramatically Limit the RA/TA positions that are paid for with our taxes that go to out-of-country students...

If we really need highly skilled workers, why not just create a permanent allowance to have them become citizens if they get a US PhD in a useful skill?

But providing cheap labor for US tech firms is a farce that the H1-B keeps filling.

Especially during an economic recession/depression, we don't need more H1-B visas - we need LESS.

I don't see anything in the bill that would ban outsourcing. The text of the bill can be found here: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:h5630ih.txt.pdf

Am I missing something?

I was not mistaken. This bill does not ban the outsourcing of H-1B visa holders.

What it does do is expand the number of offenses for which H-1B companies can be punished. One of these new punishable offenses occurs when an H-1B dependent company replaces an American worker with an H-1B worker from another company. This very limited type of outsourcing would trigger sanctions. However, any non-dependent company could still use outsources H-1Bs. Moreover, this type of outsourcing is already illegal. The Giffords bill would merely make it punishable.

Since only about 10% of the companies that use H-1Bs are dependent, this change in the law will likely have little practical effect.

Is there any chance of pointing to where BusinessWeek said what's mentioned in this article? I've been unable to locate any of it. And USCIS sure isn't a helpful site to find this info on your own.