In an effort to increase the number of visas granted for temporary foreign workers to more than 100,000 this year from 66,000 in 2003, eight Boston-area companies sued U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and Massachusetts’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development in the U.S. District Court in Boston last week. 

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs say the agencies wrongly prevented their businesses from getting the visas necessary for them to increase their staff for the summer.  The business-owners filing suit claim that while some companies were allowed to submit their applications for H-2B work visas as early as June 2003, they were required to delay their submissions until fall 2003.  They claim that as a result of these delays, they did not receive as many available visas as other businesses.

Additionally, the plaintiffs are claiming that the government agencies disregarded the companies’ rights to equal protection by setting different application dates for different types of businesses. 

The companies’ filed the suit, according to one of the business-owners statements to The Boston Globe, in hopes that the court will persuade the government to allocate an additional 40,000 visas this year.  Massachusetts’ lawmakers are currently backing the SOLVE Act, legislation introduced to Senate by Massachusetts’ Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, to increase the number of H-2B visas issued by this amount.  Massachusetts’ Democratic Representative William Delahunt introduced similar legislation in the house, although no action has been taken on it.