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Gina Minks, a technical trainer at EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, knew full well that the high-tech industry was in trouble, so she wasn’t shocked to be laid off last year. But when Minks saw newly hired foreign workers coming through the door as she and other American employees were sent packing, the 37-year-old Milford resident was less philosophical.

“I was really angry,” says Minks. “They were bringing in people at the same time I and other people were being laid off.”

Minks says her position was eliminated, but insists that she and other laid-off workers were qualified for jobs for which foreign workers were being hired.

It’s a bit of turnabout that Minks and other technology workers are saying is anything but fair play. In the overheated economy of the late 1990s, US firms desperate for trained employees increasingly turned to H-1B visas, which allow skilled foreign workers to be brought into the US for stays of up to six years. But with the high-tech industry in the doldrums, out-of-work IT workers are charging that the visa program is costing Americans jobs.

Not only that, but the displaced techies have identified a new visa villain: L-1s, which allow firms that have US and overseas operations to transfer their foreign workers here. Critics say the guest-worker category is being abused by firms that bring workers here to do jobs for other companies.

When Alison Campbell was laid off in March from her position at Centive, a Bedford software company, she left behind her a team of foreign-born programmers working under contract with Westborough-based Virtusa Corp. Campbell says the workers were in the US on L-1 visas, transferred here from Virtusa’s offices in India or Sri Lanka.

Bob Conlin, Centive’s vice president of marketing, says the Virtusa team didn’t knock anyone out of a job, because none of the workers laid off during Centive’s recent downsizing had the skills to perform the specific work Virtusa was hired for. “We contracted with them because they convinced us they could do a good job,” he says of Virtusa.

As for the workers the contractor brought in for the project, Conlin says, “we didn’t care where they come from.” Conlin says he’s aware that Virtusa makes use of L-1 visas, but doesn’t actually know whether the six or seven programmers sent to his company were here on L-1 visas or not.

Officials at Virtusa declined several requests to speak about their use of foreign workers. But the practice of bringing workers to the US on L-1 visas and then using them in contract jobs is coming under increasing scrutiny from immigration officials.

“If someone came into the United States and then was being farmed out to a third party–not working for the subsidiary in the United States–that would appear to be a clear violation” of visa regulations, says Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Bentley says the bureau has begun an investigation into charges that L-1 visas are being used improperly.

In contrast to H-1B visas, there are no limits on the number of workers who can enter the US under L-1s, nor is there any requirement that firms pay wages comparable to US industry standards. The use of L-1 visas has increased fully 50 percent over the past five years, with 38,307 visas issued in 1998 and 57,721 issued last year, according to the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.

In 1998, Congress authorized an increase in the yearly cap on H-1B admissions from 65,000 to 115,000 workers, and then in 2000 increased it further to 195,000 workers. The moves came amid cries from the US computer industry about a severe shortage of qualified workers. On Oct. 1, however, the visa limit will revert to 65,000 unless Congress reauthorizes a higher cap.

“Our position is, it definitely should roll back to the 65,000 level,” says Paul Almeida, president of the department for professional employees at the AFL-CIO national office in Washington. “We feel it was never truly utilized for what its purpose was.”

The number of H-1B visas issued reached 201,543 in 2001 (workers at nonprofit employers are not counted toward the cap) but declined to 109,576 last year, according to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

In 2000, US Sen. Edward Kennedy supported the visa-cap increase but sponsored an amendment to the bill that doubled the fee paid by US firms for each H-1B worker from $500 to $1,000, with a portion of the new revenue funneled to training programs for US workers. Kennedy has yet to take a position on whether the higher cap should be reauthorized this fall. But a Kennedy spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, says that with so many people out of work, there’s less agitation for extending the quota this time around. Meanwhile, two bills have been filed in the US House of Representatives that would restrict the use of L-1 visas.

Greg Eden, manager of corporate public relations for EMC, says 300 to 400 of the data-storage company’s 11,200 employees in the US are here on H-1B visas. EMC has been a leading voice in calls for beefed-up math and science education in Massachusetts schools in order to “improve the talent pool here,” Eden says. But H-1Bs remain “important,” he adds, “because they give employers access to a broader talent pool and they improve on a company’s ability to compete.”

While industry officials tout the foreign-worker visas as a necessary tool for US firms to maintain their competitive edge, high-tech casualties of the economic downturn say that edge seems to be coming at their expense.

Six months after being laid off, Minks, a single mother of two, finally landed a new job, but one that paid $11,000 a year less than her old one at EMC. “If thousands of techies are being laid off, there seems to be no reason to go outside the country” for new hires, she says. “It’s not right.”