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Getting into the United States legally isn't easy — not even for sought-after, high-skilled professionals.

Before coming to the University of Arizona, assistant professor Cecilia Rios-Aguilar came from Mexico on a student visa in 2001 and earned a master's degree and Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in New York. She has an H1B visa, which allows high-skilled professionals with degrees to work in the country for six years.

Even though she is bilingual and has fairly extensive experience navigating the U.S. immigration system, she still feels tense and vulnerable every time she visits a U.S. consulate to renew her visa.

"There is this mystery that you just don't know what is happening," says Rios-Aguilar, who recently had to wait two weeks for a visa in Mexico City. "The lack of information is what is really hard for me to deal with."

From getting the first visa to renewing it midway through the six-year period to deciding what to do when it expires, professionals here on H1B visas can never fully relax, visa holders and immigration attorneys say.

The U.S. government caps new H1B visas at 65,000 a year, and the entire quota for 2007 was filled on the first two filing days, April 2-3, when 123,480 cap-subject petitions poured in. Even more applications are expected this year.

Another 20,000 "masters" visas are available each year for foreigners with master's degrees earned in the United States, but those evaporated within a month of the filing date. Some organizations, such as four-year universities, are exempt from caps.

In 2006, 109,614 new H1B s and 161,367 continuance H1B were issued, numbers from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show. The totals reflect both visas subject to the annual cap and those that aren't, such as masters or exempt visas. Those numbers are slightly higher than 2005 but less than the 287,000 issued in 2004.

The visa allows for dual intent, which means it can be parlayed into a green card if an employer sponsors the applicant. But there is a 140,000 yearly cap on employment-based immigrant visas and a per-country cap of 25,620 for non-immediate family members of U.S. citizens.

That means some H1B visa holders converting to legal permanent residency face at least a three-year wait. The U.S. State Department's March visa bulletin shows officials are handling applications filed on Jan. 1, 2005, for the category many fall under. The wait is more than a year longer for people from countries with heavy levels of immigration such as Mexico, India, China and the Philippines. Spouses and children are allowed in with the H1B visa holder but aren't supposed to work until they get green cards.

Many U.S. companies and immigration attorneys argue the quotas should be relaxed to meet the labor demands of the U.S. economy. But those who favor limiting immigration see granting temporary and permanent visas to foreign workers as a mistake. It perpetuates the country's dependency on foreign labor, says Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based organization that advocates for slowing immigration.

"If you want skilled workers, you should be able to produce them domestically in a country of 300 million people with the finest university system in the world and public expenditures on K-12 education of nearly half a trillion dollars a year," Camarota says. "My concern with employment-based green cards or temporary (visas) is that it allows American education to atrophy."

Such thinking misses the point, says Tarik Sultan, a Tucson immigration attorney who specializes in employment visas.

"These companies would like nothing more than to hire Americans if they were available for these jobs in sufficient numbers," Sultan says. "These companies do not like wasting countless man hours and paying lawyers like me thousands and thousands of dollars to get workers. That is the fallacy of the anti-immigrant, restrictionist argument."

Rios-Aguilar, an assistant professor in the UA's Center for the Study of Higher Education, faced an April deadline for switching her student visa to an H1B visa. She could have made the appointment in Nogales but since her family lives in Mexico City, she decided to take a week off and make an appointment at the U.S. Embassy there.

She flew home to Mexico City on Feb. 1 and made an appointment at the embassy for Feb. 5. She booked a return flight for Feb. 9.

She had been told to expect the process would take a couple of days — it took 15.

She didn't know why it was taking so long until a friend who works at the embassy told her that the delay was due to a new regulation that went into effect in 2008.

Without the visa, she could not return to the U.S.

She had to stay in Mexico until February 20, pay an additional $360 for three flight changes and miss an extra week and a half of work at the UA .

"We are privileged people in the sense that we have colleagues, we have a support system that provides us some information," she says. "But, what happens to all those people who are trying to do this legally who don't have the same support system and the same level of education that I have?"