Border security funding boosted by $600 million, paid for by increasing H-1B fees
million for 1,500 additional Border Patrol agents, Custom and Border Protection officers, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel; $196 million for Justice Department programs; $32 million for two more drones; and other money for things like communications equipment and new facilities.
The bill the House passed last week calls for $200 million in cuts to offset costs and an additional $500 million in emergency funding, which adds to the federal deficit. The McCain-Kyl bill would have tapped into
unused economic stimulus funds, which Schumer said takes money from job-creation efforts.
Increasing H-1B fees
The U.S. Senate approved a large H-1B and L-1visa fee increase Thursday to offset a $600 million boost in funding for border security. The Senate measure increases the H-1B visa application fees by $2,000 per application on those firms that have 50 percent of their employees on this visa.
Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau writes that the fee increase will have the biggest impact on the large Indian offshore firms, such as Infosys Technologies Ltd., Wipro Ltd., and Tata Consultancy Services, which use thousands of H-1B visa holders to service U.S. customers. Firms such as Microsoft and Google also hire many H-1B visas holders, but they are relatively a smaller fraction of their U.S. workforces.
The House also passed a border security funding measure, one that calls for $701 million in spending, but it did not include an H-1B visa fee increase. Both chambers must now reconcile the two versions.
The Senate’s fee increase will also apply to the L-1 visa, but it is uncertain whether it would apply only to those firms that are also H-1B-dependent. The text of the legislation has not been released.
Thibodeau notes that another group of H-1B users that may be affected by this increase are smaller outsourcing companies that dot office parks around the United States. They include companies such as Logic Planet Inc., a New Jersey company that employs 95 software engineers, developers and analysts, 89 of whom (93 percent) hold H-1B visas.
Logic Planet disclosed its head count in court documents. It is one of the firms, along with the TechServe Alliance, an IT services industry group, which is challenging the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services over its interpretation H-1B rules.
The $2,000 increase may be added to the $320 H-1B filing fee, said Sarah Hawk, who heads the immigration practice at Fisher & Phillips LLP in Atlanta.
Thibodeau writes that H-1B visa fees can add up. There are a number of other add-on fees as well: a $500 antifraud fee that is required for any new H-1B and L-1 visa user, and a fee for training U.S. workers that scales from $750 to $1,500, depending on the size of the company applying for a visa. Many companies also pay $1,000 extra for what is called premium processing to accelerate handling of the visa. Legal fees can also run as high as $2,000.
Hawk said she suspects that companies will try to recoup the fee from salaries or see if the individual can pay for it.
