White House pares work visa programs
Immigration offerings for skilled workers hit
It may be a while before President Donald Trump gets another chance at creating a new, “merit-based” immigration system, a keystone of his four-part plan, which Congress rejected last month.
In the meantime, his administration is busy making it harder for skilled migrants to come work in the United States.
The State Department has ended an Obama-era program to grant visas to foreign entrepreneurs who want to start companies in the United States. It is more aggressively scrutinizing visas to skilled workers from other countries. And it is contemplating ending a provision that allows spouses of those skilled workers to be employed in the U.S.
The administration and its backers contend that it’s trying to fix flaws in the existing, employer-centric skilled immigration system while advocating for a complete overhaul of America’s immigration system.
“The stuff that they’re actually doing is not so much restricting skilled immigration as enforcing the law,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports reducing immigration. “They’re rolling back some of the extralegal measures that other administrations have taken.”
A primary avenue for skilled immigrants to enter the United States is the H1B visa for specialty workers, which is heavily used by the technology industry. About 85,000 visas are issued annually in a lottery system. Some critics argue they are a way for companies to avoid hiring U.S. citizens; Trump himself has said H1B recipients shouldn’t even be considered skilled.
Businesses have noticed a change. “We’ve got employees that are going through the process, who have gone through such a level of scrutiny and interrogatory that is unprecedented,” said Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, which advocates for H1B visas and has had one of its own workers have to move back overseas ecause of delays in approving the requisite visa.
Akash Negi, 26, graduated last month with a master’s in sciences and analytics from Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. He earned the degree while working as a big-data analyst at JP Morgan Chase.
Negi moved to the United States after his father got a diplomatic visa as part of a job at the United Nations, but his legal residency doesn’t include a work permit.
He was able to work while a student but is waiting for his STEM OPT visa to remain employed, and he is concerned that Trump will gut the program. It lets international science and technology students work legally in the U.S. for up to three years, and it was expanded by President Barack Obama.
Negi noted that he understands Trump’s stated goals of protecting U.S. workers but said he’s going about it incorrectly.
“Any country wants to protect its own citizens, but you don’t just end the program when you don’t have your own population trained,” Negi said.