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Microsoft (MSFT) leaders Bill Gates and Steven Ballmer have led a steady flow of executives of high-tech company to Capitol Hill to try to convince lawmakers to allow more visas for permanent immigrants or temporary foreign workers.

This is the result of the lack of people that are needed as software engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists coming our of the U.S. educational system; the supply can't be filled by domestic training alone.
 
A lot of high-tech business need to hire foreign students with advanced degrees from American universities, and a large number of these students have the desire to work in the U.S., the problem is the existing law allows up to only 20,000 foreign workers with advanced degrees from American universities to be exempt from H-1B visas.

H-1B visas are the temporary work visas provide to skilled professionals in the U.S., especially in the technology and health care fields.

The bill on the floor of the Senate will increase the number of H-1B visas, but companies say it's not near enough for what is needed to compete on a global level.

As usual with government intrusion into the free market, this new Senate bill could cause all sorts of problems. For example, tech companies are alreaday saying that new provisions in the bill won't allow them to sponsor targeted jobs for specific immigrant workers; something that makes no sense at all.

Another provision is the amendment would require some H-1B workers to be paid more than their American counterparts that are doing the exact same work. That has such potential for disaster that it's almost unbelievable that it would be included in the amendment. Of course all of this has to pass to be relevant.

The job crisis is already upon us that we've talked about for some time at managersrealm. We can't assume in our businesses that we will be able to secure the workers we need for our purposes.

We need to have contingency plans in place if we can't get the workers we need. It's impossible because of the diversity of businesses to lay out any one plan that would fit all. But we have to understand that this isn't going to get better any time soon. Shortages have been on some industries for some time. We need to evaluate whether this will impact our business in any large way.

For some businesses, a strong training program in place could help a lot to alleviate some shortages. Obviously that won't work for some industries. When I say training can alleviate shortages, I'm talking about in getting qualified workers, not the availability of people. Some shortages are connected to qualified workers like the tech and health industries. Other industries don't need that type of qualification and so can train people to be what they need to be for a company.

The thing we can't do is ignore the demographics and aging work force in the U.S and other parts of the world. Research needs to be done within the industry we're in to see if we have adequate workers coming up through the pipeline that will fill our long-term needs.

If not, we need to create scenarios and plans that will meet the company's needs as potential shortages increase.