Prime Minister Julia Gillard has pledged to clamp down on the "457" temporary work visas.
Yet none of this mattered to a couple of employees who were on H1B work visas.
FORBES: Transparency Across the Ranks: Can They Handle the Truth?
Many of those living in Dubai have limited work visas and it is nearly impossible to become a citizen.
President Barack Obama announced in June his deferred-deportation program allowing young immigrants to apply for work visas.
But there are people who say let's have work visas, let's have a fence, let's have an open border.
Just last year, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services exhausted the available pool of work visas in mere weeks.
Firms apply for more employment based green cards and temporary high skilled work visas when the economy is thriving.
FORBES: Positive New Steps To Reform High-Skilled Immigration
Some of these issues could be eliminated or at least diminished by using a market-based strategy to distribute work visas.
The United States has nearly doubled the annual quota of temporary work visas it grants to foreign professionals--to 195, 000, from 115, 000.
The US educates foreign students whose work visas are then sometimes rejected, which semiconductor executives claim works against growing US prosperity.
One option would be to grant them temporary work visas with a longer-term path to citizenship and a higher tariff rate.
FORBES: The GOP And Immigration: Good Economics, But What About The Politics?
This market-based proposal for work visas provides mobility, and creates an accessible process that would benefit both high and low-skilled workers.
In 2012, the national immigration board started granting 1, 200 annual work visas to families from the Caribbean island to meet the growing influx.
If the U.S. is willing to provide work visas for young, illegal immigrants, then it should also be willing to implement policies to retain well-educated, foreign nationals.
FORBES: Why America's Flawed Immigration Laws Have Me On The Road To Self-Deportation
Though these two-year work visas do not lead to permanent residency or citizenship, they provide immigrants with a mechanism to advance their careers and lives by working legally.
FORBES: Why America's Flawed Immigration Laws Have Me On The Road To Self-Deportation
He told Mr. Lew the issue of short-term work visas shouldn't be mixed up with immigration, according to an account of the meeting Mr. Chidambaram gave to Indian media.
We should help foreign graduates and foreign professionals, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, through an increased number of available H-1B work visas and a STEM green card program.
The measure would include procedures for border security and stronger employer sanctions, as well as a new emphasis on legal immigrants who rely on work visas as opposed to family visas.
For instance, a shortage of work visas and the short filing window once a year prevent companies from hiring highly skilled and educated candidates requiring new H-1B visas on a daily basis.
The solution to illegal immigration is for Congress to combine a viable immigration enforcement regime with a vastly improved system of legal work visas, either through smaller individual bills or as part of comprehensive immigration reform.
If there's a darker note here, it's that Congress remains uninterested in keeping those foreign students in the country once we've invested in their training -- witness the annual cap of H-1B work visas at 65, 000.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has pledged to clamp down on the "457" temporary work visas granted to skilled migrants eager to share in the country's mining boom that has helped power more than two decades of annual growth.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has pledged to clamp down on 457s, the temporary work visas granted to skilled migrants eager to share the spoils of the country's mining boom, which has helped power more than two decades of uninterrupted annual growth.
WSJ: Australia Attracts More Than $1 Billion in Potential Investment Under Visa Program
Existing programs do this in part by transferring rents to the firms that utilize work related visas, but this comes with the cost of distorted labor markets.
The program is meant to be an alternative or in-addition to work-based visas which tie you to a particular employer.
Under rules that came in last month, employers and colleges must join an official register to sponsor work or student visas.
If expanding these work-based visas is the only option then I fully endorse this proposal, but I think we can do better.
Apart from the somewhat obvious argument that many immigrants would prefer place-based over work-based visas, there is an economic argument for them as well.
应用推荐