Although the buzz about immigration reform has come to a head in recent weeks, the prospective of the United States Congress reaching a real resolution on the matter now seems distinctly far off.

The Senate ruled in a 50-45 vote taken late Thursday to extend deliberations of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, rejecting a Democratic call to close debate and move toward a final vote on the legislation.

The bill was introduced to the Senate on May 9 by Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada. Since then, the Senate has considered more than 40 amendments and held 28 roll call votes on the legislation.  Nevertheless, a number of Republicans on Thursday asserted that  they had not had enough time to deliberate the bill. A similar bill is currently under deliberation in the House of Representatives.

For now, the matter appears to be shelved indefinitely. "We are finished with this for the time being," Senator Reid reportedly said Thursday.  He then turned the Senate's attention to energy legislation, the New York Times reported.

Among many of the act's potential impacts is a significant change for the United States' high-tech industry. The bill would raise the H-1B foreign skilled worker visa cap from 65,000 to 115,000, and apply the current 20,000 cap exemption to those with a master's degree or higher from an institution of higher education in a foreign country, not just U.S. advanced degrees. The bill would also raise the limit on employment-based visas from 140,000 to 290,000 per year.

Not all senators were happy with the bill's increase in allotted worker visas, and sought to reshape the legislation to make employing foreign workers less attractive to companies. In May, an amendment to the proposed bill was passed to raise the fee a company pays for an H-1B visa from $1,500 to $5,000 each.

Many tech industry groups and companies, including the Electronics Industries Alliance and Goggle, argue that the H-1B visa system is sorely in need of reform, as each year the limited number of visas have become more coveted and harder to get. In April, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap of 65,000 for fiscal year 2008 just one day after starting the receipt of applications, marking the fifth year in a row that the cap has been reached before the start of the fiscal year. For fiscal 2007, it took under two months for the cap to be reached.

Although controversial, an increase in H-1Bs would not be at all unprecedented, as Congress raised the cap to 195,000 in 2000 to accommodate the U.S.'s technology boom. By the 2004 fiscal year, however, the cap was back down to 65,000, and it has not been changed since.

By: DocMemory
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