New York state's two U.S. senators say that National Grid, a major utility in the Northeast, is considering outsourcing as many as 1,200 jobs (including many in IT) and they are urging the utility company to keep these jobs in the U.S. This is a political push that may have broader implications in the H-1B visa and offshore outsourcing debate that U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer is spearheading.  Schumer leads immigration reform via his role as head of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security. The other New York senator urging National Grid not to outsource high-paying jobs is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who wrote a letter this week to Tom King, President of National Grid USA, urging him to keep the jobs in the United States. Many of the jobs being outsourced by National Grid are IT related, including software programming and computer networking, wrote Gillibrand. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Public Policy in New York said it’s good news that Schumer and Gillibrand are encouraging National Grid to keep the jobs in the U.S. “But we need more than speeches and pressure on firms. We need significant policy change, change that hasn’t been forthcoming, even though the Democrats control both Congress and the presidency.”