washington

Despite legislation that nearly doubled the number of computer programmers, academic researchers and other high-tech workers allowed into the United States in 1999, the annual quota of H-1B visas has been reached with three months still remaining in the fiscal year.

All 115,000 visas in the category were given out by the middle of last month, and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) says it will not grant any more until October.

Congress raised the H-1B quota from 65,000 last summer after a lengthy political fight that pitted US labour advocates against the computer software industry, which is keen to hire more foreign programmers (see Nature 394, 610; 1998).

American universities use only a small fraction of the H-1B allocations each year for faculty appointments. But evidence collected by the Washington-based Association of International Educators (NAFSA) suggests that universities bear a disproportionate amount of the pain when visas run out early. Because the academic fiscal year ends in July, new faculty tend to be hired just when the H-1Bs are becoming scarce.

Representatives from NAFSA, the College and University Personnel Association, and the Association of American Universities met with key legislators last month to plead their case. Among the proposals to address the special needs of higher education would be a plan to reserve a certain number of H-1B visas for academic use.

But this would have to be done through legislation, and observers say there is little appetite on Capitol Hill this year for another battle over high-tech visas.

Senator Phil Gramm (Republican, Texas) plans to introduce a bill this month calling for the H-1B cap to be raised permanently to 200,000. But this would almost certainly be opposed by the White House and many pro-labour Democrats, and is given little chance of passing.

Meanwhile, Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas), who chairs the House of Representatives subcommittee on immigration and was a key figure in last year's H-1B compromise, has been more concerned recently about the misuse of visas, particularly in India, which he says is taking a significant portion of the annual quota.

According to an investigation cited by Smith, 45 per cent of H1-B applications examined by a US consulate in India could not be authenticated, and 21 per cent were fraudulent.