Becomes first state to sue new Trump travel ban
State attorney general says order will harm its tourism, Muslims
The state of Hawaii has become the first state in the US to sue to stop President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban.
Attorneys for the state filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in the federal court in Honolulu. The state had previously sued over Trump’s initial travel ban, but that lawsuit was put on hold while other cases played out.
Hawaii gave notice on Tuesday night that it intended to file an amended lawsuit to cover the new ban, which plans to goes into effect from March 16.
The revised executive order bars new visas for people from six predominantly Muslim countries and temporarily shuts down the US refugee programme.
Hawaii’s lawsuit says the order will harm Hawaii’s Muslim population, tourism and foreign students.
“Hawaii is special in that it has always been non-discriminatory in both its history and constitution,” Attorney General Douglas Chin said. “Twenty percent of the people are foreign-born, 100,000 are non-citizens and 20% of the labour force is foreign-born.”
Chin, who noted the state has budgeted about $150,000 for an outside law firm to help with the lawsuit, said people in Hawaii find the idea of a travel ban based on nationality distasteful because they remember when Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during World War II.
With the Donald Trump administration seriously mulling H-1B visa reforms, at least half a dozen bills have been tabled in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, contending that the programme that is popular among Indian IT firms eats into American jobs.
Authors of all these bills from both Republican and Democratic parties believe that H-1B work visas, which are highly popular among Indian techies and Indian IT companies, tend to replace American workers.
In less than a week of Trump being sworn in as the 45th US President, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, and Assistant Senate Minority Leader Dick Durbin, introduced the “H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act” to prioritise American workers and restore fairness in visa programmes for skilled workers.
Democrat Zoe Lofgren -- who represents a Congressional district in California that includes Silicon Valley -- introduced “The High-skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017”.
The bill proposes a skill and wage-based system for allocation of H-1B visas and seeks to more than double the minimum wage for an H-1B visa holder to $130,000.