what’s at stake
A new push by the Trump administration for green card applicants to begin the process overseas is sending tremors through Big Tech and other industries that rely on nonimmigrant visas to hire skilled workers.
The policy rolled out last week by US Citizenship and Immigration Services would require most aspiring permanent residents to seek green cards outside the United States except in “extraordinary” circumstances.
The Trump administration later suggested that H-1B and L-1 visa holders wouldn’t be affected by the new policy, creating more confusion around the directive and the scope of its disruption.
A USCIS official described the memo describing the shift as a “tool to address fraud and abuse which exist in our immigration system.”
“This policy will have no noticeable impact on highly qualified applicants and skilled professionals who have followed the law,” the official told Semafor. “These aliens benefit the national interest and provide economic benefits to the United States and will continue to merit the favorable exercise of discretion.”
Some immigration lawyers don’t buy those assertions, however, after reading the fine print of the memo. There is at least one certainty: The new policy will face legal challenges, with organizations already working to build cases.
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who’s making the case
Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer, said the administration probably won’t use the policy to target highly-skilled workers applying for visas:
“I think they’re fine, generally speaking. When they initially put it out Friday morning, they made it seem like, ‘Oh my god, nobody can adjust status.’ And then they literally walked it back on Friday night a little bit. … I think for the most part, H-1Bs and L-1s are probably OK.”
Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said H-1B holders should not infer from the administration’s subsequent comments that they are exempt:
“The memo itself, in footnote 20, says the opposite. It says do not assume that dual intent will shelter you from any sort of negative discretionary factors. So the memo itself says Hs and Ls are not exempt.”
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, agreed that the memo “explicitly” applies to H-1Bs — but noted it’s too early to tell how strictly the administration will enforce the policy:
“The memo says what the memo says, which is that it’s an extraordinarily unusual person who should be allowed to adjust their status in the United States. That’s what it says. That is, as far as USCIS goes, that’s the law. Now, the statements that they’ve put out after that assert new language not in the memo. The press release announcing the memo used much stronger language than the memo itself, and so there are two ways to read that.
“One is, the administration is setting a very strong position from the top, sending a strong signal to its employees that they need to be very strict about this policy. The other is that they’re basically doing a sales job for their base and this isn’t really what they’re actually going to do in practice. Look, I don’t have data for you. There’s no way to know exactly how it’s going to be enforced. But it’s just wrong to say that it doesn’t apply to H-1Bs. It does. It explicitly does.”
Notable
- The directive is one of several ways President Donald Trump is seeking to restrict legal migration, The New York Times writes.
- The administration is already asking some green card applicants why they didn’t leave the US in order to apply for permanent status, The Washington Post reported.