Area firms: Ease limits on biotech worker visas
It's a phenomenon that Cambridge immigration lawyer Vincent Lau observes each year: a scramble among biotechnology companies trying to win coveted visas for their overseas hires.
''There's a frenzy among employers," said Lau, a lawyer at Flynn & Clark PC. ''If you miss the boat on this, you can wait months and hold up business."
And holding up business in Boston's life sciences industry could knock the city from its perch atop the nation's biotech clusters, according to a report to be released today by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
The report said one way to make the region more competitive would be to relax immigration restrictions on foreigners with advanced scientific degrees.
''There is a real need to attract and retain international talent in our region," said Paul Guzzi, the chamber's chief executive, in an interview yesterday.
Guzzi cited competition from Korea and Australia, as well as the United Kingdom and other well-established scientific regions. Specifically, the chamber's report calls for higher limits on the annual number of visas for specialized workers, called H1-B visas, from the current 65,000 to a number closer to the 195,000 issued just three years ago. The chamber said it also plans to closely monitor recent US government pledges to ease the scrutiny that has dramatically slowed visa renewals since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Looser immigration restrictions are favored by a number of industry groups, as well as by Microsoft Corp. founder and chairman Bill Gates, who lobbied Washington on the issue in April. But a reduction in restrictions is opposed by labor groups seeking to protect US jobs and by some members of Congress, who have argued that faster visa renewals and greater numbers of foreign scientists could expose the United States to security risks.
The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce said businesses should not be paralyzed by such concerns. ''We saw a lot of changes after Sept. 11, and many of those were necessary. But we have to be careful we don't go too far," said Jim Klocke, the chamber's executive vice president.
The cause has been taken up by Democratic Massachusetts Representative Michael E. Capuano, who says restrictions need to be lifted on narrow categories of highly trained scientists -- particularly doctorate holders who receive their training from educational institutions like Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
''We have always attracted the best and brightest from around the world," Capuano said. ''They come here as students, and stay as professional scientists, and they become Americans."
The chamber's report on life sciences competitiveness today follows a ranking released last week by the Milken Institute, an economic think tank in Santa Monica, Calif., that placed Boston at the head of the class on a biotech index showing current strength and growth potential. Boston was closely followed by San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Raleigh and Durham, N.C., and San Diego.
The chamber said Boston and Massachusetts should adopt more traditional Chamber of Commerce goals such as the streamlining of land-use permits to make it easier to build new laboratories, and the creation of more housing to ease the pressure of rising home prices.
The chamber also said the state needs to attract additional federal research funding so it can become more of a leader in the field of ''bioinformatics," which involves handling the massive task of crunching data and generating maps related to human genome research.
Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com. 
