This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 7, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Before the fiscal year has even begun all the H-1B visas will be spoken for,

the visas that allow high-skilled workers to come to the United States

and apply their trade for a few years. But with so few visas available in so many high-skilled

jobs in the U.S. waiting to be filled? What are high-tech industries to do?

Dan Griswold, the Director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, has a few suggestions.

The H-1B program has been around for a few decades and it's aimed at high skilled foreign-born professionals.

It allows them to come into the country temporarily, typically for three years, renewable for another three years, and then the expectation is they go back to their country.

In 1990, Congress put a cap, it didn't have a cap before, but Congress put a cap of 65,000 H-1B visas a year.

And at the time that wasn't an issue because the number of workers coming in under the program was significantly below that.

We were less of a high-tech economy back then, but that 65,000 cap came to be a problem in the late 1990s as a high-tech boom took off.

The United States cannot produce on its own, it seems, all of the brain power necessary to fill all these jobs.

Bill Gates went before Congress and was arguing for an increase in the cap and presumably that sentiment is felt throughout Silicon

and throughout the tech sector.

Yeah the problem became apparent in the late 1990s when the dot-com boom, the high-tech boom took off there literally were not

enough Americans to fill the position and that 65,000 cap soon became a

problem to the point where there weren't enough visas to go around.

U.S. companies were looking for workers, and then in the fall of 2000, Congress tripled the cap to 195,000.

Well unfortunately the dot-com bubble burst around then

and so we had the phenomenon that there were actually a couple of years there

where there were about a couple of years there where there were about 100,000 unused visas.

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