By Bruce Stokes The immigration deal under consideration in the Senate raises the number of H-1B visas, a long-sought boon for the high-tech industry that will provide Silicon Valley firms with skilled workers at rock-bottom salaries who will bolster company profits. To recapture for the taxpayer the implicit subsidy these visas give private firms, future H-1B visas should be auctioned to the highest bidder, with the proceeds boosting funding for scholarships and training in science and technology for American citizens. At the same time, meaningful enforcement should finally be imposed on the H-1B program to ensure that it is not used to undercut the wages of existing high-tech workers. The H-1B visa was created in 1990 to provide U.S. employers with temporary computer engineers and programmers. The number of such visas has been as high as 195,000 in 2002 and 2003, but is now capped at 65,000. The Senate immigration deal would raise that ceiling to 115,000, with the option of increasing it further to 180,000. The visa is available for three years and renewable for another three. Employers wishing to obtain an H-1B visa must attest that they could not fill the job with an American and promise to pay the local prevailing wage. In the late 1990s, a $500 user fee was assessed for H-1B visas. That charge has subsequently been raised to $1,500. These monies support college scholarships and training in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. But employer compliance with the H-1B rules has been questioned. As Ron Hira, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, points out in a recent paper for the Economic Policy Institute, the Labor Department acknowledges that "H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker." The median wage for new H-1B computing professionals was $50,000 in 2005, far below the median for U.S. computing professionals, according to the annual report of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. And the Labor Department's inspector general has acknowledged that his agency merely rubber-stamps employers' applications for H-1B visas. More important for the American taxpayer, the current allocation system for H-1B visas conveys a valuable resource -- access to talented workers who add value to a company's bottom line -- at almost no cost. This is a subsidy in violation of market principle for firms that are only too quick to appeal to market forces when they are fighting Washington over export controls or other issues. To impose a market test on the allocation of H-1B visas and to capture their market value for the taxpayer, any new immigration legislation should offer such visas through an auction. Employers would bid for this limited resource, paying whatever they thought the visas were worth to them. If the workers who use these visas are as valuable as Silicon Valley claims, high-tech companies should be willing to pay much more than $1,500 for each permit. Such an auction would ensure that only those workers who promise to add the greatest value to the U.S. economy would get H-1B visas, because companies seeking such permits for low-value-added work would get out bid. To garner business support for auctioning H-1B visas, the new immigration bill could raise the cap for such permits to 200,000 or 250,000, an increase Silicon Valley has long demanded. To ensure that small and medium-sized firms continue to have access to some of the H-1B talent, a portion of the visas could continue to be allocated through a lottery. The funds raised by this auction could be dedicated to bolstering the pool of money currently available for scholarships and retraining, so there are more Americans who can fill high-tech jobs in the future. To ensure that H-1B visas don't undercut high-tech jobs and salaries for American workers, the new program will need strong oversight. The Senate immigration deal includes tighter enforcement, drawing on a bill sponsored by Majority Whip Durbin and Finance ranking member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. The final Senate version should be sure to include their requirement that before an employer may submit an H-1B application, the job opening associated with that visa must be advertised for 30 days on a Labor Department Web site. The Durbin-Grassley bill would also give the Labor Department the right to conduct random audits of any company that uses the H-1B program, and would require Labor to conduct annual audits of major users of the program. To give Labor the personnel to fulfill this oversight mission, Durbin and Grassley would authorize the hiring of 200 additional investigators. The H-1B visa program is beleaguered on all sides. Industry claims it limits hiring flexibility. Workers say it undercuts wages. And no one has ever tallied up the cost to the taxpayer of giving away this limited, valued resource. The immigration bill now moving through the Senate is an opportunity to afford industry access to more talented workers, to ensure that the visa program supplements rather than displaces American workers and, for the first time, by auctioning H-1B visas, to capture the market value of these visas to pay for the training of future generations of American scientists. Such reforms are the best way to make sure that everyone gains from the H-1B visa system.