The recent Senate-passed budget bill is a step in the right direction: it expands the number of employment-based green cards and temporary visas available to highly skilled foreigners.

With great fanfare, the government today handed over the first of a planned 20,000 "green cards," papers allowing skilled foreigners to come here and work in computer jobs.

The committee, voting 13 to 4, also adopted provisions favored by business leaders to protect American workers from losing their jobs to temporary skilled foreigners.

The H-1B, granted to highly skilled foreigners to help fill jobs when no qualified Americans can be found, has been an important recruiting tool for technology companies.

Nor is Tokyo likely to ease the demographic crunch by liberalizing immigration, say, by admitting skilled working-age foreigners from Hong Kong.

He increased significantly the number of Russians travelling to the West and the number of skilled foreigners settling in Russia.

Visas granted to students, exchange visitors and highly skilled foreigners dropped from 787,000 in 2001 to 625,000 last year.

In Britain, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, proposed in March to relax rules on hiring skilled foreigners.

TO alleviate apparent shortages of computer programmers, President Clinton and Congress have agreed to raise a quota on H-1B's, the temporary visas for skilled foreigners.

And then we had Vince wanting the door open to skilled foreigners.