At the same time, some industry groups are considering lobbying for legislation to raise the annual quota for H-1B visas and allow more foreign technical workers into the United States.

A law that will expire on Sept. 30 raised the number of temporary visa holders to 195,000 a year. Unless Congress ups the level again, visa numbers will drop back to 1999 levels of 65,000, a cutback that some advocates call too steep.

In its regular quarterly report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also said that unemployment among computer scientists and systems analysts held relatively steady at 4.9 percent in Q1.

But there is a caveat. BLS narrowed the definitions of both categories in January in a revamping of its occupational-classification system, adding new job categories in an attempt to create more detail in the employment numbers. In addition, a BLS labor analyst said the bureau corrected some past coding errors, resulting in a further reshuffling of numbers.

Some types of engineers were removed from the EE category and placed in a new one for "computer hardware engineers." The jobless rate for that group was only a touch better than for EEs, at 6.5 percent for the quarter.

Despite whatever skew may have entered into the numbers because of the category changes, the 7 percent figure for EE unemployment marked a distinct surge. The annual average EE unemployment rate last year was 4.2 percent, and the final quarter of 2002 saw a decline in joblessness, with EEs recording 3.9 percent unemployment, according to the BLS report for that quarter.

IEEE-USA president John Steadman said he has "never heard" of unemployment among EEs being so high, but is not totally shocked given the number of engineering layoffs he has seen in his area-near Fort Collins, Colo.-in the last several months.

The result, he said, is "a very substantial and negative effect on the economic conditions of the United States." Not only are the unemployed "not contributing to economic growth," but "their unemployment benefits are draining corporate and government resources at the state and federal level. This should be viewed with grave concern by Congress and policy-makers."

The numbers can only add fuel to the fire in the visa debate. H-1B visas allow employers to sponsor skilled foreign workers for six years, if they cannot find qualified U.S. candidates for the jobs in question. IEEE-USA believes the H-1B cap should stay put at the 1999 level of 65,000 a year.

But a vocal critic of H-1B policy says that won't happen. "The industry simply won't stand for a reversion to 65,000," said Norm Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. Matloff believes lobbyists will work to set an annual H-1B cap above 65,000, or create a new visa category that does not specify a quota.

High-tech employers have become "addicted" to H-1B visas because the program has been "so beneficial" for them, said Jessica Vaughan, senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS; Washington). "It's allowed them to find cheaper employees and has become almost like a government subsidy to these employers."

Employers have also used L-1 temporary visas. Intended for multinationals transferring executives, managers and employees with specialized skills from a foreign office to a U.S. location or affiliate, the L-1 visas carry fewer stipulations than H-1Bs and are easy to abuse, said Vaughan. Recruiting firms have used them to move large numbers of employees from India to the United States, where they will work for cheaper rates than native labor, she said. The Department of Justice is rumored to be investigating abuses of the L-1 program by so-called "body shop" recruiters of IT workers from India. The department neither confirms nor comments on ongoing investigations.

Not every high-tech sector has been hit equally hard by the downturn. The U.S. software industry added 5,300 jobs between January 2001 and December 2002 and uses "many H-1Bs," said Thom Stohler, vice president of work force policy for the American Electronics Association (Washington). Conversely, "a lot of the jobs lost [in the electronics industry] were in manufacturing, which is not generally where H-1Bs are used."

Latest U.S. figures show lower demand for EEs, other tech workers.

If the visa number drops to 65,000 a year, Stohler said, the cap would be reached in late summer or fall of 2004.

A spokesman said the House Judiciary Committee will look at H-1B visa caps before the current legislation expires this fall. But aides for one committee member who backed the visa hike in 2000 declined to state the representative's position now.

Demand for H-1B visas "has dropped considerably since 2000," said AEA's Stohler. AEA member companies are now more selective, he said, and "only use the program to bring in advanced-degree recipients who have graduated from U.S. schools." Only about 80,000 H-1Bs were used in 2002, Stohler said. Even so, the AEA hasn't ruled out lobbying to increase the cap this year, he said.