June Kronholz reports on H1B visa petitions.

The Immigration Service says it stopped accepting visa applications Tuesday from employers hoping to hire skilled foreign workers, one day after it started the once-a-year process of accepting the forms. The immigration service said it received 150,000 visa petitions within hours and will decide who gets the visas through a lottery that will take several weeks to organize.

Congress allows for 85,000 of the so-called H1B visas to be issued yearly to employers hoping to hire engineers, teachers, nurses, technicians and other skilled workers from overseas. Some 20,000 of those visas are reserved for foreigners who have a graduate degree from a U.S. college or university. The visas can be issued only from the start of the fiscal year in October, but the immigration service accepts applications beginning six months early. That was April 1, last Sunday, so visas that arrived that day were stamped as received on Monday, April 2. By Tuesday, the immigration service had more than enough applications and closed its visa window. It will return any applications received after Tuesday, and will organize a lottery to determine which of the 150,000 applicants get an entry permit.

Employers are certain to complain, and will likely put new pressure on Congress to pass an immigration law. They want far more temporary visas for skilled workers, contending that the economy needs the workers. Last year, the visas were taken up within two months, and employers argued that showed that the economy needed more workers than Congress would permit.

Congress is sympathetic to the employers’ argument and agreed in last year’s failed immigration bill to increase H1B visa numbers. But advocates for illegal immigrants, and for legal immigrants seeking to increase the number of visas available for family reunification, have resisted a separate bill for the skilled temporary workers. They fear their interests will be ignored if Congress starts passing piece-meal bills that deal with less-controversial aspects of immigration.

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