Close watchers of the visa programs

Of the many agreements struck in the Senate immigration bill passed Thursday, one of the most critical came courtesy of two long-standing adversaries: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO labor federation.After an impasse on guest worker visas helped derail an earlier reform effort, business and labor managed to sort out their differences this time around, settling on a deal that had a little something for everybody. Businesses essentially won an expansion of the foreign guest worker visas they've come to rely upon, while organized labor got to see meaningful protections written into the legislation for the sake of both U.S. and foreign workers.

But when it came to the visa issue, there was a workforce whose lobby lacked the money and firepower of the AFL-CIO, let alone corporations: high-skilled U.S. tech workers, like software engineers.The final Senate bill would expand the number of H-1B visas that allow U.S. tech companies to bring foreign workers here temporarily. Labor advocates have long maintained that unfettered guest worker programs have a way of depressing wages for American workers while exposing foreign ones to exploitation. The Senate bill does include labor-backed protections pertaining to the tech sector, but experts say those provisions were largely undone by loopholes added through amendments backed by Silicon Valley.

Close watchers of the visa programs say the final bill was a rout for the tech industry. Policy experts can debate whether the influx of H-1B visas will ultimately help or hurt U.S. workers, but in the end the tech companies won their visa expansion without the concessions that other industries submitted to."It was pretty much a landslide," said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. "The industry got everything. They got way higher [visa] numbers with few protections in there."

One of the industry's major victories was the so-called "Facebook loophole." If it becomes law -- far from certain, given the House GOP's vow not to take up the immigration package as a whole -- the Senate bill would put tougher standards on companies considered "H-1B dependent." Companies where at least 15 percent of the workforce is made up of H-1B visas would have to recruit U.S. workers before foreign ones, and they would have to pay a higher prevailing wage rate to the workers on visas.