Consulates will ask people applying for guest-worker visas how much they paid a recruitment company.
It plans to foot that bill by increasing significantly the fees for skilled-worker visas (known as H1-B and L-1 visas).
The data shows that since fiscal year 2008, the agency has issued 15% fewer H-1B high-skilled worker visas than the law requires.
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While American companies also compete to obtain the foreign guest worker visas, most are not as dependent on the visas as Indian companies, industry representatives said.
Last year he brought over 490 welders and metal-fitters from India on H-2B guest worker visas--ten-month visas for blue-collar laborers filling jobs that no American citizens want.
Still, it was an American company, New Jersey-based Cognizant Technology Solutions, which was the No. 1 user of the guest worker visas, with nearly 9, 300 in 2012.
An amendment reducing the number of guest-worker visas from 325, 000 a year to 200, 000 passed handily, as did another promising 370 miles of fence along the border.
The total number of guest-worker visas would be able to climb in any year to a cap of 200, 000, but any number above 20, 000 would require passing a complex bureaucratic formula.
Over the weekend, business groups and organized labor signaled a major breakthrough on the road to comprehensive immigration reform when they announced they had finally struck a deal on guest worker visas, a major obstacle.
"Lack of talent in the United States and the abundance of talent in countries such as India" is the reason for high demand for foreign tech worker visas, said Ameet Nisarkar, senior vice president of NASSCOM.
At issue in the U.S. are high-skill worker visas called H-1B that have been dubbed the "outsourcing visa" by critics who say the system allows companies to bring in cheaper tech workers from abroad instead of hiring Americans.
Earlier this month, the U.S. reached a limit on the yearly allotment of applications for skilled-worker visas for jobs starting in October or later, leaving companies such as Infosys at the mercy of a random selection of applications.
U.S. tech firms successfully lobbied for the draft immigration bill to include caps on the number of foreign workers a U.S.-based company can employ on skilled-worker visas, according to lobbyists working for U.S. firms and another representing Indian outsourcers.
What's needed is to end illegal immigration by creating ways for needed workers to come legally -- creating worker visas and establishing a system that allows employers who can't find enough willing and able Americans to connect easily and quickly with lawful immigrants.
Two weeks ago, House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor delivered an important speech that signaled a willingness to support legal residence and citizenship for children brought here illegally along with a guest-worker program, as part of granting visas to high-skilled immigrants educated at our universities.
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The number and type of visas provided through a guest-worker program would have to be sufficient to address this pressing need.
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But Indian outsourcing giants sponsor more than half the 65, 000 skilled-worker permits, known as H1-B visas, that the U.S. issues annually to workers with at least a bachelor's degree.
Still, Republicans and Democrats placed strict new conditions on the immigration measure on Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to slash the number of foreign workers who could come to the U.S. on temporary visas, capping the guest-worker program at 200, 000 a year.
Last year, when we visited Motivatit Seafoods in Houma, Louisiana, we met a group of Mexican women who were brought into the United States with H2B visas, part of the guest-worker program.
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