Some good news for a change. The Senate passed a border security bill and increased the fees on H-1B Visas to $4300 per Visa. Every bit helps, especially when H-1Bs are used to technology transfer, wage repress and displace U.S. workers.

AFP:

A summary of the bill said the funds would be raised with a 2,000-dollar per visa increase in the price paid by specific companies for non-immigrant "H1B" visas for highly skilled workers or "L" visas for intracompany transfers.

"We're talking about foreign companies that more than half of their employees" are on those visas, said Schumer. "All we're saying is, you're going to have to pay more for those visas."

"This is not going to affect American manufacturing. This is not going to affect American jobs. What it's going to do is hopefully create some vacancies for Americans at some of these higher skilled jobs that these companies -- foreign companies -- are using the visas," he added.

Business Standard:

Infosys, which derives over 66 per cent of its revenue from North America, employs around 12,000 people in the US. However, while discussing the Immigration Bill on the US Senate floor on Thursday, Charles Schumer, the Democrat Senator from New York, likened Infosys Technologies to a “chop shop” — the place where stolen parts are dismantled and sold. The senator was participating in the debate before the Senate passed a $600 million Border Security Bill which has proposed to almost double the H-1B and L-1 visa application fees from $2,300 to $4,300.

“The emergency border funds will be paid for by assessing fees on foreign companies known as chop shops that outsource good, high-paying American technology jobs to lower wage, temporary immigrant workers from other countries. These are companies such as Infosys. But it will not affect the high-tech companies such as Intel or Microsoft that play by the rules and recruit workers in America,” The Wall Street Journal quoted Schumer as saying in the Senate.

The Indian IT industry has consistently protested the anti-outsourcing rhetoric of American politicians. The uproar of the anti-outsourcing lobby was at its height when the US was heading for presidential elections, and continued even after President Barack Obama took over. In May 2009, fresh out of elections, Obama had singled out Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, to refer to outsourcing of jobs. “Say no to Bangalore and yes to Buffalo,” the US president had said at that time.

While this is great news much more needs to be done. Watch out for Schumer. While the rhetoric is dead on, the supposed plan on comprehensive immigration reform is to increase H-1B and L-1 Visas even more and much, much worse, turn our educational system into a glorified green card ATM.

That would flood the U.S. technical labor market much worse than it is today.