Models trump engineers in US visas

[Larry1]

So concludes this article about US immigration law:

H-1B Models Strut Into U.S. as Programmers Pray for Help

Ravi Shanker makes weekly pilgrimages to Chilkur Balaji temple outside Hyderabad, India, asking for a little help on a visa from an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Shanker, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, a top engineering school, is praying for an H-1B visa to enter the U.S. He needs all the divine intervention he can get, because he’s not just vying with other software engineers for the high-skill work permits. His other rivals? Fashion models.

An oversight by Congress two decades ago led to the inclusion of models in the H-1B class. A 2007 bill to put them in another category -- and let their numbers soar -- failed. Its sponsor: then-Representative Anthony Weiner of New York, who quit Congress in 2011 after engaging in lewd online behavior.

Anthony Weiner sponsoring a bill to let more hot girls into the US - the jokes about this practically write themselves.

While models will get fewer than 1 percent of the non-immigration H-1Bs, the employer-sponsored temporary work permits are increasingly coveted. Demand was so high this year that the government’s cap on applications was reached only five days after the filing period opened on April 1. “It’s the one exception that we all scratch our heads about,” Neil Ruiz, an analyst at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, said of the addition of models as the only H-1B category that requires no bachelor’s degree.

As Congress again debates a plan to steer more skilled foreign workers to the U.S., it’s likely to leave intact the provision allowing fashion models to compete for permits. Revisions being considered in the Senate would raise the basic H-1B visa cap to 110,000 from 65,000 permits and increase fees on employers who depend heavily on the foreign workers. Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat co-sponsoring a bipartisan proposal, declined comment.
Fashion models are almost twice as likely to get their visas as computer programmers, by one rough measure. There were 478 initial applications made for fashion models in 2010, according to U.S. Labor Department data compiled by Bloomberg. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 250 visas for models. More than 325,000 H-1B petitions were filed for computer-related occupations; about 90,800 visas were distributed to foreign information-technology workers, including immigrants whose visas were being renewed or changed, and those who worked for higher education or nonprofit institutions that weren’t counted against the H-1B cap.

More than 99 percent of H-1B applicants had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. Slightly more than half the H-1B models had no high school diploma, Ruiz said. Still, the average salary for an H-1B model was $161,000, almost three times the U.S. median household income, he said.
The Washington-based research organization found that New York was the most commonly sought destination for H-1B models, with 68 percent of applications originating from potential employers in the city. More than one in four H-1B models came from Brazil, Brookings found.
The inclusion of fashion models into the visa category that allows at least 65,000 scientists, engineers and other highly skilled foreign workers to work in the U.S. has its roots in a 1990 revision of immigration law that created separate classes of visas for performers, athletes, Nobel Prize laureates and religious workers.

After Congress passed the revision, former Representative Bruce Morrison, a Connecticut Democrat who led the House immigration panel, said lawmakers realized they hadn’t put fashion models in a separate category or moved them to a special class reserved for performers and athletes.

“It just wasn’t something anybody talked to us about,” said Morrison, currently working as an immigration lawyer and lobbyist. Fashion models were placed into the H-1B visa category under a 1991 technical amendment sponsored by the late Senator Edward Kennedy. Sixteen years later, Weiner sponsored a bill to put models in the category for performers and athletes and allow as many as 1,000 to work in the U.S.

“The only question that we are trying to assess out here with this bill is whether or not people who come in for a day or two at a time to do a photo shoot and then want to go back, whether we should facilitate that type of commerce,” Weiner said during a 2008 hearing on the bill.
U.S. Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat who led the panel that considered Weiner’s bill, said the addition of fashion models in the same category as highly skilled technical workers had “increasingly caused real problems” as demand for H-1B visas began outstripping supply. Even after a 20-3 committee vote in favor of the Weiner bill, the legislation stalled.

Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican, derided the legislation as “The Ugly American Bill.” Weiner, who is considering a run for mayor of New York, didn’t return calls left through an aide. “They viewed it as frivolous, something about pretty girls,” Morrison said of the bill. “But it’s important, a big business.”

Foreign models such as England’s Kate Moss and Brazil’s Gisele Bundchen are among the public faces of a global fashion industry that generated revenue exceeding $1.3 trillion in 2008, according to a 2009 study by the Datamonitor Group, a London-based market-research firm.

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