Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:24:09 GMT

Clinton meeting Tata, Ambanis on Saturday

Mumbai: India Inc honchos Ratan Tata, Mukesh Ambani and others are likely to explore measures to boost bilateral business ties during their brainstorming session over breakfast with US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton on .

Clinton is scheduled to arrive in the city tonight on an official visit to India during which high-level discussions are likely to promote bilateral co-operation in the $30 billion Indian civil nuclear power programme and the the $43 billion bilateral trade.

She will be flying-in from the Czech Republic capital, Prague.

http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=3131275

"Want to Move a Worker to the U.S.? Good Luck"

As director of Oracle’s (ORCL) U.S. immigration program, Denise Rahmani arranges work papers for foreign employees the company wants to bring to the U.S. Last year, she says, the federal government denied 38 percent of Oracle’s visa requests. “It used to be almost none of them got rejected,” Rahmani says. Today, “it feels like the roll of the dice every time.”

U.S. companies have griped for years about how hard it is to hire high-tech workers from abroad under the government’s H1-B visa program. Now, they’re upset with the Obama administration about the difficulty of getting visas for foreign workers already on their payrolls who are needed for key projects in the U.S. So intense is their frustration that Oracle, Microsoft (MSFT), Starwood Hotels (HOT), and some 50 other companies warned President Obama in a March letter that “American job growth and the U.S. economy are being harmed.”

At issue are the L1-B visas used for transferring workers with “specialized knowledge,” as defined by a 1970 federal immigration law. Getting these permits used to be routine: From 2003 through 2007, an average of about 8 percent of company requests were denied by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In 2008 the rejection rate tripled. Last year it hit 27 percent.
STORY: H-1B Visas Hit the Cap, Sending Companies to Plan B

Corporations complain that Washington is inundating them with requests for more information about a foreign employee’s expertise and then making seemingly arbitrary decisions. Rahmani says the administration denied one Oracle worker’s request to extend his stay because he didn’t know enough about one type of software—even though he’d written its training manual. Immigration officials are “suggesting that the workers are interchangeable,” she says. “They don’t seem qualified to judge and assess what we deem as the right resource to do a job or deliver a project.”
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