Washington: As the Trump administration announced new restrictions on H-1B visas, a leading immigration expert in Washington believes that the Trump administration has taken a “shockingly anti-business stance” in its crackdown on the visa programme.
In an exclusive interview with IANS, Sarah Pierce, the Director of Social Policy at Third Way, a think tank, argued that the current policies are making the United States “unattractive” to foreign students and workers.
“Everything that the Trump administration is doing is causing foreign talent to leave the United States, because they have established attacks on international students. There’s a lot that the Trump administration is doing to make the United States unattractive to both international students and international workers,” she added.
Pierce also emphasised that the targeting of international students would, in turn, hurt American students.
“US universities are hugely dependent on the revenue that comes from international students who pay not only full tuition, but even usually additional fees to study in the United States, and those benefits go towards scholarships that are frequently used on American citizens,” she noted.
On Tuesday, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed to “amend its regulations” governing the H-1B process.
The DHS proposal seeks to scrap the existing lottery system and implement “a weighted selection process” that would generally favour the allocation of H-1B visas to higher-skilled workers.
The proposal comes after US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation last week to crack down on H-1B visas, announcing a $100,000 fee for each new application.
Pierce, who is a former Policy Analyst in the Humanitarian Affairs Division of the Office of Policy and Strategy at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the hefty fee and the new weightage system will likely be challenged in court.
“The $100,000 fee is just shocking on its face. I am very sure that it will be challenged in court. I think it will be difficult to establish the grounds. These are absurdly high challenges for a program that’s very important to many US employers,” she highlighted.
While signing the proclamation at the White House last week, Trump said the “incentive is to hire American workers”.
A White House Spokesperson also told IANS last week that the policy would “discourage companies from spamming the system”.
“President Trump promised to put American workers first, and this common-sense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages. It also gives certainty to American businesses that actually want to bring high-skilled workers to our great country but have been trampled on by abuses of the system,” said Taylor Rogers, the White House spokeswoman.
Pierce acknowledged that there were “significant problems” with the H-1B visas, but there was no need to “burn this programme down”.
“I do not think that we need to burn this programme down or approach it in the way that the Trump administration is they are taking a chainsaw when the solution requires a scalpel. There are ways to adjust the program to allow individuals to push back when there are cases where companies are blatantly using the H-1B visa to replace US workers,” she said.
She highlighted the recent deportation of South Korean workers from a Hyundai factory in Georgia as an example of “direct conflict” between the administration’s priorities of bringing manufacturing back to the United States and continuing the immigration crackdown.
“This administration’s approach to immigration is in direct conflict with their approach to tariffs and their desire to bring manufacturing back into the United States. If we’re attacking the ability of high-skilled immigrants to come into the United States, that’s going to harm companies that may be interested in coming to the United States to establish operations,” she added.
On the relative silence of tech companies and other corporations over the H-1B visa restrictions, Pierce believed that big companies are scared of angering the administration.
“One of the most frightening things about this current administration is how scared they have made corporations and businesses in the United States. We are in a very scary moment in American politics, and it is because of that moment that we’re not seeing a lot of push back from businesses on these H-1B visa changes,” she added.
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