PALO ALTO — Companies are seeking more foreign workers than ever before to fill highly skilled jobs in technology and other industries, but the United States will grant visas to just a fraction of them in a lottery that began this week.
Anxious to bump up those visa limits, a bipartisan campaign is seeking to make an exemplar of one of the record 233,000 people vying for 85,000 H-1B temporary visas: Belgian entrepreneur Pierre-Jean “PJ” Cobut. If Cobut cannot obtain a work visa before his student visa expires in June, the co-founder of Palo Alto’s Echo Labs said he planned to move his health care device startup to Canada.
