John Robert Egan's Blog (9)

The H-1B visa is commonly known as the Professional Worker's Visa and has been heavily used in the finance and tech industries as a tool for recruiting top international talent into information technology, software engineering and other specialized jobs in the information economy. A recent article in the New York Times, headlined "Large…

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Sooner or later, everyone who is in the tech field for the long run bumps up against the U.S. immigration system. The tech talent pool is global, our engineering schools have plenty of international grads looking to be placed into U.S. jobs, and smart international investors are looking for U.S. tech entrepreneurs to back. And the unanimous reaction to the immigration encounter is “the U.S. immigration system really sucks!”

A …

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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service ran its annual selection process to distribute the quota of 85,000 high-skilled worker visas among over 172,000 applicants in April.  Tech firms who rely on the H-1B visa category are finding this bottleneck in the labor market increasingly difficult to manage and appear to be developing strategies for…

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Political junkies (like me) and immigration stakeholders (including many technology employers) have been watching as the immigration reform process moves forward in the current congressional session. After much watching and speculation (see for example, earlier posts here) about what impact this will have on the high tech industry, there is now a bill being offered in the U.S.…

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Following on from the November election there has been renewed talk about visa reform, and three parts of the discussion are relevant to our tech community here in Hawaii.  Proposed actions include easing visa requirements for international graduates in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) fields, creating a new “Start-Up Visa” for entrepreneurs, and raising the quota for H-1B…

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About a year ago I blogged in this space about proposed federal legislation that would have opened a new visa pathway for international entrepreneurs with potentially viable business start-up plans.  That bill, sponsored by senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) did not pass into law.  This week the New York Times, in its…

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Demand for H-1B visas, known as the "high tech worker visa" because nearly 50% of the annual quota is used by high tech companies hiring international computer programmers, analysts and developers, has slowed well below recent years' numbers during the current filing season. Continue

There is interesting news from Washington, D.C. this week on the immigration front. Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) have introduced a new bill in Congress to establish a new visa category for entrepreneurs who are ready to found a new business enterprise. They have titled this the Start-Up Visa, and hope to gather support from congressional colleagues interested in job… Continue