More Firms Using Foreigners to Fill Professional Ranks : Number of Temporary Visas for Business Purposes Soars

When Pulse Engineering recently decided to bring an executive at its Irish subsidiary into its San Diego-based headquarters for an extended period of time, personnel director David Disque joined the growing number of corporate executives who are placing telephone calls to immigration lawyers.

In 1986, the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued 66,925 visas to professionals who already work in their native countries for companies affiliated with U.S. corporations--a 432% increase over the 12,570 “intra-company transfer” visas that were issued in 1975, according to Interpreter Releases, a Washington-based newsletter.

The INS has witnessed equally stunning growth in the number of foreign professionals who apply for temporary work visas that enable them to take jobs offered by employers in this country and work here for up to six years. The 54,426 visas that were issued to foreign professionals in 1986 represented a 250% increase over the 15,550 visas that were issued in 1975.

Most of those visas were issued to citizens of countries that have strong business links to the United States, according to INS data surveyed by Interpreter Releases. In 1986, British professionals were issued 9,800 temporary visas; Canadians, 6,144; Mexicans, 3,200, and Japanese, 2,086.

The demand for temporary employment visas has grown in step with the increasingly international nature of the U.S. economy, according to Stephen Yale-Loehr, a former immigration lawyer with a Washington law firm who is now an associate editor of Interpreter Releases.

Easier to Obtain

Professionals employed by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies still account for a hefty percentage of intra-company transfer visas issued by the INS, Yale-Loehr said. But increasingly, intra-company transfer visas are being issued to foreign executives who enter this country in order to manage newly acquired, U.S.-based companies.

“Just go down to Otay Mesa (along the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego County) and you’ll see just how international business has gotten,” suggested Cliff Rogers, INS deputy district director in the San Diego office. Otay Mesa’s growing collection of industrial parks is increasingly viewed as prime site for foreign companies to establish manufacturing and assembling operations.

And temporary visas, which typically can be obtained in a matter of months, have grown in popularity as backlogs for permanent employment visas have increased to as long as six years, Yale-Loehr said. Temporary visas also are easier to obtain because there are no quotas and no need to prove that the foreign worker will not displace a qualified U.S. citizen. All that is required is that the applicant prove that he is a “professional” as defined by the INS and has a job waiting for him in this country.

Foreign professionals who obtain temporary visas can immediately apply for a permanent visa, according to Robert Cane, an immigration attorney with the San Diego law firm of Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps. But it is generally more difficult to obtain a permanent visa because INS guidelines for permanent visas are more restrictive than for temporary visas and annual quotas limit just how many permanent visas are issued.

Still, many U.S.-based companies will file for permanent applications when it is determined that foreign workers will be required long after their temporary visas expire, Cane said.

That was the case when FlightSafetyInternational, a Long Beach-based company that offers flight training to commercial airline pilots, determined that it wanted to keep some foreign workers who held temporary visas.

FlightSafety initially had turned to the foreign labor pool for technicians who could craft complex computer simulations to help airline pilots learn to escape the potentially deadly effects of wind shear, an atmospheric disturbance that can cripple airliners on take-off and landing.

FlightSafety purchased a Canadian-built simulator to handle the simulations. Executives subsequently determined that the quickest way to get the simulator into action was to hire computer technicians who had worked for the manufacturer.

“We needed some software engineers who were familiar with the manufacturer’s format and we needed some hardware people who knew the manufacturer’s technology,” said Al Gagne, FlightSafety’s director, Air Carrier Support.

FlightSafety eventually brought five Canadian technicians into the country on visas that are valid for up to six years. FlightSafety, which prefers to manufacture its own equipment and has an overwhelmingly American work force, “would be stuck in the mud going nowhere” without the Canadians, Gagne said. “We’d never be able to get anyone to the level of proficiency that (the Canadians) are at.”

Consequently, FlightSafety is working to qualify some of those Canadians for permanent visas that would allow them to remain in the United States after their temporary visas expire.

“We brought them in to satisfy some temporary requirements, but with the constant changes in aircraft and (simulator) improvements that are always being made, we’re looking for permanent residency for these folks,” Gagne said. “I don’t think we can do without them.”

FlightSafety prefers to build its own equipment and to hire U.S. citizens, according Gagne. Consequently, many of FlightSafety’s employees are hired from the U.S. military.

But Gagne dismissed a suggestion that the Canadians were taking away employment from U.S. workers, saying it would have taken years for an American to become familiar with the Canadian equipment. And U.S. workers would never gain parity with their Canadian counterparts because the simulation business is changing so fast, Gagne said.

Obtaining temporary visas has been relatively easy for FlightSafety, according to Gagne. But it has been more difficult to obtain permanent visas because the requirements are stricter, and “it seems that the people (at INS) are interpreting the rules and regulations instead of merely following them,” Gagne complained.

The INS examiners who process visa requests are sequestered at four regional offices, including San Ysidro, Calif., which handles requests from several Western states, and in Burlington, Vermont, which handles applications for much of the East Coast.

The INS purposely selected those out-of-the-way locations in order to keep immigration attorneys from pressuring staffers, Yale-Loehr said. Initially, “no one even knew the telephone numbers” of the four centers that handle temporary work visa requests, Yale-Loehr said.

“We’ve decided that we can be more effective if we put (examiners) into a situation where they’d have no phone calls, no interruptions,” Rogers said. “We’ve found that our limited resources go much, much further that way.”

Typically, the applications can be handled in just minutes, but “increasingly, they are more complex, which is why we have specialists handling them,” Rogers said. The San Ysidro office handles all temporary work visa applications from California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and Guam.

The remote examining locations can cause headaches for employers and attorneys who want to track paper work once it enters the INS bureaucracy, Cane said.

“Those regional locations were supposed to speed the process up, but as it stands, (INS employees) may have only 10 or 12 minutes for each petition that we spend weeks and weeks putting together,” Cane said.

During the past two years, Pulse Engineering, has brought five key employees to the United States from facilities in Hong Kong, Ireland and Mexico. Those “intracompany” transfers moved smoothly through the INS, Disque said, “but we definitely need an attorney to guide us through the process because INS has changed the rules on who is eligible to enter.”

Companies that try to take shortcuts on visa applications can make that already complex application process even more uncertain, according to Cane.

INS inspectors base their decisions on guidelines contained in operating manuals and an examinations handbook--information that is made available to immigration lawyers--but “trouble comes in cases where there’s something marginal” in the application, Cane said.

Aware that INS employees typically have only minutes to scan visa applications, Cane regularly includes a “two-to-three page letter that shows the (potential) employee meets all requirements for the visa.”

But even accurate applications can run into problems, Yale-Loehr said. The president of a foreign company who wanted to enter the United States to open a U.S. subsidiary in San Francisco successfully sued the INS after it denied him a temporary visa.

“The candidate could be the president of the company, but because he had no formal degree, under the INS guidelines he might not qualify as a professional,” Yale-Loehr said. “But it’s ironic because an MBA who is wet behind the ears would be classified as a professional because he’s got the degree.”