An advocacy group for U.S. software programmers proposes an intriguing fix for a possible flood of H-1B visa applications.

The Programmers Guild is calling for guest worker visas to be given to companies pledging to pay the highest salary, with salary serving as a proxy for skill level.

“H-1B workers with the highest skills should be given priority,” the guild said in a statement last week. “In no case should a ‘Ph.D. genetic researcher’ lose out to a ‘$16/hour accountant.’ ”

Currently, the government uses a lottery system to decide which petitions will be approved for H-1Bs in the event of high demand for the visas, which allow skilled foreigners to work in the United States. There is an annual limit of 65,000 for most H-1B workers.

The first 20,000 H-1B workers who have a U.S. master’s degree or higher are exempt from the cap. April 1 is the first day employers may file petitions seeking H-1B workers for fiscal year 2009, which begins October 1.

For the last fiscal year, the H-1B cap was reached on April 2—the first day employers could submit petitions.

The guild’s proposal is part of a broader H-1B visa debate, in which some have called for raising the program’s annual cap.

Under the guild plan, the top salaries promised would get the H-1B visas subject to the cap of 65,000.

“Any business with a critical need for an H-1B candidate could be assured of approval by paying a higher wage,” guild president Kim Berry said in a statement. “Since the median H-1B salary is about $55,000, any H-1B paying more than about $65,000 would be approved.”

Making a high wage a factor for getting a visa potentially raises costs for employers. Small businesses in lower-wage markets in particular might be squeezed by such a change.

But the proposal could help make sure the sharpest workers come in under the H-1B program, which is used heavily by the technology industry. It also could help prevent the underpayment of H-1Bs, which undercuts the salaries of U.S. workers and makes it less likely that American workers will enter fields that now rely on foreigners.

A guild report from 2006 concluded the H-1B prevailing wage is substantially below the median wage of U.S. workers.

H-1B wage problems also surfaced in a 2006 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It found that 3,229 H-1B applications were certified by the U.S. Labor Department, “even though the wage rate on the application was lower than the prevailing wage for that occupation.”

The guild’s alternative to the H-1B lottery includes a second provision that raises tricky questions of national interest and global economics. The guild would give U.S. employers preference over foreign consulting firms. Critics, including the guild, have argued that use of the visas by foreign firms fuels the shift of work abroad.

At least when it comes to the salary piece, the guild’s alternative to the H-1B lottery is on the money, it seems to me. What do you think?

News that HR consulting firm Mercer forged a deal with an executive search firm in Vietnam is a sign of the times.

U.S.-based firms that pitch talent-related services see strong growth in Asia even as evidence keeps pointing toward a downturn in the U.S. economy.

Mercer, a unit of professional services firm Marsh & McClennan Cos., said Thursday, March 14, that it signed an agreement with TalentNet of Vietnam to market and provide Mercer’s proprietary research, HR management tools and survey data.

Guo Xin, deputy region head of Mercer for the Asia-Pacific region, said the agreement with TalentNet further underscores Mercer’s ongoing commitment to expanding in Vietnam.

“With Vietnam experiencing such phenomenal growth in the past years, so too has demand for Mercer’s offerings, particularly with data-driven products and services from our Information Product Solutions (IPS) division,” Guo Xin said in a statement.

I met with Guo Xin last year in Beijing  and heard him say similar things about China’s rapid growth and the accompanying demand for HR-related help.

Mercer is not alone in jumping on the Asia bandwagon. Right Management, the consulting firm that’s a subsidiary of staffing giant Manpower, last month announced new positions for two executives in Asia.

And executive search specialist Korn/Ferry International saw its executive recruitment fees  in the Asia-Pacific region jump 36 percent in the three months ended January 31, to $25.3 million.

That was a much faster clip than the 21 percent growth overall in the firm’s executive recruitment fees. What’s more, those Asia-Pacific placements had a higher profit margin—21.5 percent—than Korn/Ferry’s executive recruiting gigs in North America, Europe and South America.

But how long will Asia be golden? A big question right now is whether China, Vietnam and other Asian countries can avoid catching America’s economic cold. There’s some thinking the slowdown at hand will be fairly global in nature .

If that’s the case, all the diversification in the world may not do much to help U.S.-based talent advisors weather a rough patch.

Friday’s employment report from the U.S. Department of Labor is a great reminder of how statistics can mislead—and another sign of brewing trouble for the global economy.

The U.S. economy lost 63,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in February, the largest monthly decline since March 2003. But the official unemployment rate actually fell slightly, from 4.9 percent to 4.8 percent. So is the job situation improving or worsening? And why the seemingly contradictory numbers?

The two sets of statistics come from different government surveys. But it’s not as if the payroll employment figure—which comes from a survey of business and government establishments—is somehow missing a big jump in employment captured in the unemployment rate, which comes from a survey of households. The household survey found a decrease of 255,000 employed individuals from January to February. But the unemployment rate edged down because the civilian labor force shrank by 450,000.

The civilian labor force is defined as the sum of employed and unemployed people. Sounds simple enough. But the “unemployed” category is a bit tricky: People only get counted as such if they had no employment during the reference week of the survey, they were available for work at that time and “they made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the four-week period ending with the reference week,” as the Labor Department puts it.

That means the unemployed tally excludes “discouraged workers.” They are defined as people who wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months, but who hadn’t done so in the previous four weeks because they believed no jobs were available for them. There were 396,000 discouraged workers in February.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has an interesting column this week  saying that the employment rate of Americans in their prime years, 25 to 54 years old, has been falling, even as the unemployment rate has been declining. That means one of two things, he says: Either a growing number of people have been choosing not to work purely by their own volition, or there’s been a rise in the number of folks who aren’t working and aren’t actively looking but would like to find a good job. The latter, he says, appears to be the better explanation.

“[T]hese nonemployed workers tend to be those who have been left behind by the economic changes of the last generation,” Leonhardt writes. “Their jobs have been replaced by technology or have gone overseas, and they can no longer find work that pays as well.”

The latest U.S. employment figures not only point to a decline in consumer spending power, which bodes poorly for both the American and world economies. They also suggest Americans’ support for global trade may weaken further. Although Washington officials passed a stimulus package aimed at boosting the U.S. economy, the measure fell short of seriously strengthening the economic safety net into which many U.S. workers are falling.

Will American workers, at some point, decide that the global economy as it is set up just doesn’t work for them?