Former United States Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill meeting visa applicants outside the U.S. Embassy’s Visa Section in New Delhi. (File Photo)

ATLANTA : Anumukonda Lakshmi, a 14-year veteran of chemistry classrooms in Hyderabad, India, may be the face of things to come in American education.

C.N. Madhusudan, president of the Indian computer systems designer NIIT, is the face of things already happening in American business.

Lakshmi came to Atlanta’s Westlake High School in 2001 on a temporary professional visa, ushered in by a critical shortage of science and mathematics teachers. Madhusudan came here a decade earlier on a visa like Lakshmi’s — H1B in immigration parlance — to set up NIIT’s U.S. operations. Now, the $70 million-a-year company sends custom design work to branches in India and Europe.

As the debate over outsourced jobs roils communities and tests presidential candidates, the H1B visas that brought both of them to town figure large. Created in 1990 to serve as the nearly exclusive tool of technology companies like Madhusudan’s, H1Bs now bring in people like Lakshmi to fill voids in professions from teaching to nursing to architecture that go begging for qualified applicants.

In 2001, computer-related jobs accounted for 58 percent of H1B visas, according to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2002, that fell to 38.3 percent. Meanwhile, H1Bs for other jobs grew during that time. Visas for education and health care jobs, for example, nearly doubled in 2002 over the previous year.

“Here, most of the students are not going into fields of science and math,” Lakshmi explained. “They don’t want to major in chemistry and they don’t want to come to the field of education.”

Hence the teacher shortage and the need to bring them in from other countries. Most commonly, that’s India, because of its abundance of pliable and highly educated workers who are as willing to come to the United States for “exposure” as to fill call-center cubicles in Mumbai, New Delhi or Bangalore.

In 2002, of a total 197,537 approved visas, 33 percent went to Indians. That was down from nearly half in 2001, but still far ahead of China, the next largest contributor, with 9.6 percent in 2002. But even as they serve more fields in the United States whose services cannot be outsourced, H1B visas have gotten scarce, in part because of the political debate over outsourcing.

Last year, the H1B quota shrank as temporary laws boosting the yearly visa limit ran out. Business had lobbied twice to pump up that number at the height of the dot-com boom. From a limit of 65,000 in 1998, it grew to 195,000 for 2001-2003. But in October it dropped back.

Atlanta immigration lawyer Daryl Buffenstein says that is squeezing business and limiting American competitiveness at a critical time.

“It’s been a nightmare for employers,” he said. “In many cases these are jobs that wouldn’t be here if we didn’t give them to these people.”

Buffenstein said that this year there were even fewer visas available, because of about 12,000 leftover applications from 2003 and 6,800 others set aside when Chile and Singapore negotiated a free-trade agreement with the United States.

About 46,000 visas were left, and they ran out by Feb. 17. Attorney Bo Cooper, a colleague of Buffenstein, said immigration officials tell him they are getting so many advance applications for 2005 that the cap could be exhausted before the fiscal year even begins in October.

Meanwhile, those who provide the workers face their own hurdles. Ani Agnihotri of IIIrd Millennium Inc., who provides nurses from Eastern Europe, the Philippines and India to fill shortages of nurses at major hospitals, says he used to also bring in teachers but that the local bureaucracy was too sluggish. Paddy Sharma, whose Global Teacher Research and Resources recruited Lakshmi for Westlake and has about 80 teachers in Georgia schools, shares his complaint. “In every school they have so many vacancies,” she said. “But the problem is the school boards are hard to convince.”

Agnihotri now recruits only nurses, but that has its own problems, he said. Even overseas, it’s hard to find workers to fit the rules.

Even with the difficulties, Agnihotri and others believe the bulk of H1B visas will go to nursing and teaching in coming years.

In the name of protecting American jobs, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who supports tighter limits on immigration, last year tried to do away altogether with H1Bs, which account for less than 1 percent of the U.S. work force. And in the presidential campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry frequently criticizes President Bush for not punishing companies that send jobs out of the country.

Meanwhile, Bill Reed, president of the American Engineers Association, says U.S. high technology is still smarting from the damage H1Bs did to it. He says the visas are one method companies have used to ramp up outsourcing. “They bring the people in, get them trained here and then take the work overseas,” Reed said. “They go home and take our technology with them.”

(By Permission, The New York Times)