The House will vote this week on a Republican bill to raise the cap on visas for highly skilled foreign workers. Sounds good for business, right? But danger lurks.

The Workforce Protection and improvement Act is rife with provisions to increase red tape and stifle competition; Sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas; the bill could win the prize for the most anti-business bill introduced by a Republican this year.

American businesses -- especially high-tech firms depend on these visas, known as H-1Bs, to hire skilled foreign-born professionals.

The current quota of 65,000 H-1Bs has already been met for this year. But demand for these skilled workers has never been greater.

The White House opposes lifting the H-lB cap. Among other things, the Clinton administration insists on broad protections for American workers.

Ordinarily, you'd expect the GOP to jump at the chance to bring more fast-growing, high-tech companies into the Republican fold. Silicon Valley has tended to side with Democrats in the past. Senate Republicans were quick to seize this opportunity by recently passing their own bill to raise the H-lB cap.

Smith's bill, on the other hand, is a gift to the Clinton Labor Department. It contains measures more liberal than those proposed by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and the AFL-CIO, and that were voted down by the Senate.

Smith's bill would make employers jump through so many Labor Department hoops and contains so many traps for innocent employers that the new H-1B visas would be practically unusable.

Adding insult to iniury, Smith's bill raises the visa cap for 2 1/2 years: But the Labor Department bureaucrats hired to manage H-lB workers will have their jobs indefinitely.

And under Smith's bill, no private employer could hire an H-lB professional unless the Labor Department gives its OK.

The bill would require companies to meet industrywide standards for recruitment and "make sufficient efforts" to retain current or past U.S. employees. How? And who sets the standards? That's for the Labor Department to know, and you to find out.

Another egregious component of the House bill would bar companies from laying off a U.S. professional (or even another H-1B worker) form a job a new foreign-born hire could fill.

Somehow this is supposed to save American jobs. But in Senate testimony, the Labor Department could cite only one case of a layoff that involved replacement by an H-lB visa holder.

Rather than punish companies that take advantage of foreign labor, the Smith bill punishes everyone and "protects" workers by hamstringing companies.

What reason would U.S. firms have under such a law not to move offshore to get around the new rules? None.

"If there are talented people...who can help us (and)... put millions of our own people to work, why not ask them to come to America instead of inducing American companies to invest abroad?" asked Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. "As we know from the experience of Europe, if a company does not have the right to lay people off when a project fails, it cannot take the risk to hire the very people who make it possible for it to succeed."

The Smith bill is much more in line with French socialism than American ingenuity and competitiveness. And this is legislation without a constituency. High-tech firms don't support the bill because of the restrictions. Unions don't like it because it lets foreign professionals into the country. The only people who seem to like the bill are politicians.

It seems incredible that Republican House members would give to Ted Kennedy what he could not get in the Senate.

House Republicans face an important test: Will they remember their creed of putting the brakes on federal power? Or will they back a move to expand the authority of Labor Department bureaucrats to micromanage the human resources of America's best companies? We'll know soon. And business will be watching.