Foreign worker rules too lax, agency is told

WASHINGTON — The Homeland Security Department needs to keep a closer eye on high-tech workers admitted to the United States under a special visa program, congressional investigators said Thursday.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the new department should keep track of when foreign workers admitted with H-1B visas enter and leave the country, and develop rules for how long workers who lose their jobs are allowed to remain in the country.

"Much of the information needed to effectively oversee the H-1B visa program is not available," the GAO said.

The Homeland Security Department agreed with the recommendations.

With the strong support of the high-tech industry, Congress has authorized hundreds of thousands of skilled foreign workers to get the visas and obtain jobs in the United States. They can stay for up to six years. Unions have fought the program, saying companies should train U.S. workers to fill those positions.

In the last three budget years, 195,000 of these visas could be handed out each year. In the budget year that began Wednesday, that number dropped to 65,000 a year.

With the economic downturn, 400,000 of these foreign workers lost their jobs in the last two years, the GAO said. The number of workers coming to the United States dropped dramatically. And only 40 percent of those hired in 2003 were working in the high-tech industry, compared with 65 percent in 2000.

Homeland Security is responsible for keeping track of nonimmigrants who enter and leave the country, including H-1B workers. But the GAO said the two different systems the agency uses to track foreign workers do not share data with each other, and the information is not consistent, leaving an incomplete picture of the number of H-1B workers, including which employees change their immigration status and become permanent residents.

If a person with a student visa becomes an H-1B visa worker, for example, the department cannot track this until that person leaves the country and then attempts to return under the new visa. And in one-fifth of the cases, the Homeland Security Department did not have information about when the foreign workers left the United States.

The Homeland Security Department told the GAO that it is in the process of changing the systems used to track the foreign workers.