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Quite appropriately, Tuesday exposes another facet of the foolishness that is U.S. immigration policy. April 1 is the day when employers are allowed to begin filing petitions with the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services for highly skilled workers to be given what are known as H-1B visas.

H-1Bs allow employers to hire foreign workers in certain professional occupations. They are good for three years and can be renewed for an additional three. Though an H-1B cannot lead to a green card - meaning the foreign professional is tied to one employer and has to leave the country after six years of productive employment - it’s still a pretty good deal.

The problem is that, even in this economic downturn, there aren’t enough visas: Congress limits the annual grant of H-1Bs, and that magic number has been set at 65,000 for five years now. Before that, and in response to the technology boom of the late ’90s, Congress temporarily raised the cap to 195,000. But that expansion expired in 2004, and the cap has been reached earlier and earlier in each year since.

In 2005, that meant August. In 2006, May 26. Last year, the cap was reached … the very first day you could file. Yes, by the afternoon of April 2, 2007, (April 1 was a Sunday), USCIS had received more than 150,000 H-1B applications. Officials quickly announced that they would randomly select 65,000 petitions from all those received in the first two days.

Last week, with demand for the prized work permits only increasing, the powers that be decreed that the lottery would accept all entries received in the first five business days. USCIS simultaneously promulgated a rule prohibiting employers from trying to game the lottery by filing multiple petitions for the same employee.

As for the vast majority of employers and employees who will be out of luck, the immigration laws say, like so many “rebuilding” baseball teams this opening week, “wait till next year.” Except, in this case, next year means putting your business or career on hold until Oct. 1, 2009, - the day people who secure H-1Bs for fiscal year 2010 can start work.

Now, why do I care about this issue so much? Because I myself am a foreign professional. No, not an engineer or scientist - haven’t taken math since high school - but instead, doing as Washingtonians do, a lawyer.

My current employer managed to snag an H-1B for me, but only because I fit into an exemption for workers with post-graduate degrees from American universities. This exemption has a 20,000-visa cap (the rest go into the general pool), which has been hit later than the regular quota but this year is also expected to require a lottery.

But at least I get to be here, tenuous as my grasp on the American dream may be. As the H-1B petition statistics demonstrate, there are hundreds of thousands of qualified people with American job offers who cannot realize their dreams at home. These are people who want a better life for their children and see the United States as a bastion of freedom and rule of law in an unruly time. They aim to leave places that, while not always oppressing them, have economic systems less conducive to entrepreneurship than America’s (e.g., India, France, most of the world).

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 would have raised the H-1B cap to 115,000, with annual 20 percent increases if the previous year’s quota is met, but the Senate rejected it. Neither the 2006 reform the Senate passed nor the House’s STRIVE Act - a bill combining increased border security with a guest-worker program - contemplates the doctors, scientists, and software developers (forget lawyers and pundits!) the country needs to compete in the 21st century. And even those in that category who make it here must leave just as they’ve planted roots.

Thus America continues to maintain a counterproductive immigration policy, damaging pocketbooks and heartstrings from San Francisco to Bangalore. Unless Congress can do something to fundamentally reshape immigration rules with respect to skilled workers - let alone the hard-working gardeners and construction workers who get all the news coverage - things will only get worse.

If only this were all an April Fools’ joke.

Author: Ilya Shapiro

Site: cato.org

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