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The Donald Trump administration has done a lot changes to the foreign worker visas making very difficult for one to find a job in the US. He has made t so complicated that they can`t be undone in a hurry even when he walks out of the office. The easier task will be to stop executive actions for now said Cyrus Mehta New York-based immigration attorney, told IANS.
For the past four years, the Trump administration has been passing some rash rules and regulations to the country’s immigration policy. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, Trump has made more than 400 changes to immigration policy since his election.
“The saving grace here is that Trump was not able to get Congress to pass any law. The hardest is to actually change a law,” Mehta pointed out. “Congress has just not passed any law in the four years with respect to any type of substantive immigration category.”
Mehta put Trump-led immigration actions since 2017 in context and pointed to the general direction in which work visas, especially H1B and L categories, could move once President-elect Joe Biden is in the White House. Below are highlights from the conversation.
“What`s really significant when we talk about work visas – you have these travel bans, you have the H1B work visa ban that is still in effect, you have the immigrant visa ban that is still in effect. It`s supposed to expire at the end of December, but I suspect that Trump is going to extend it, so long as he is president. And then it is going to be left up to the (Joe) Biden administration to rescind those executive orders,” said Mehta.
He added, “It`s going to be much easier to rescind executive orders than regulations. So, the travel bans that restrict H1B and L visa holders from coming to the United States – we hope that the Biden administration might be able to rescind them, even though they were done under the pretext of the Covid emergency.”
Trump also proposed regulations that would gut the H1B visa program the way we know it. So for example, there is a rule that will make the H1B visa categories more restrictive. It will be much harder to win H1B visas, and if H1B visa workers are placed at client sites – which is the business model for the IT industry – the H1 B visas will only be approved for one year.
Thankfully, that regulation has temporarily been blocked. Also, the Department of Labor regulation that exponentially increased the prevailing wages made it impossible for employers to file labor certifications or even renew H1B visa petitions – fortunately, that regulation has also been blocked by the same court order. So right now we do have some respite with both these rules being blocked by the courts.”
Mehta also noted, “Trump could again issue regulation the same way as he did before – with notice and comment, but it might be hard for him to do it before January 20. If these regulations are caught up in the court system and in the appeal system, I can see the Biden administration not challenging them, and just conceding to the court challenges to these regulations.”
He added, “The saving grace here is that Trump was not able to get Congress to pass any law. The hardest is to actually change a law. But Congress has just not passed any law in the four years with respect to any type of substantive immigration category.”
