In a procedural maneuver, the Trump Administration is slightly preventing corporations from importing cheaper, foreign workers for high-skilled jobs.
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has in the last few months denied requests from employers trying to import foreign workers through the H-1B visa if the employer cannot justify why it is paying a lower wage for a “high-skilled” job, according to the National Law Review.
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa. In the last couple of decades, that number has ballooned to potentially hundreds of thousands each year, as universities and non-profits are exempt from the H-1B cap. Over the last decade, the federal government has approved more than 2.6 million H-1B foreign guest worker visas to enter the U.S., Breitbart Texas reported.
After failing to justify foreign workers imported to the U.S. for specialized jobs, companies see their requests denied by the USCIS.
Center for Immigration Studies Fellow David North says the new USCIS procedure is the Trump Administration’s way of using a “scalpel, not a sledgehammer, to implement its policies.”
“All of this puts the employers (and their lawyers) in what I regard as a delicious bind. If the job is that specialized and the qualifications are that high, why are you paying Level 1 (i.e., entry level) wages? That is the logical question,” North writes.
It does remain unclear, however, if the USCIS changes will have a meaningful impact on the foreign guest worker population in the U.S. A recent study claimed there is potentially nearly one million H-1B foreign workers living in the country, according to Breitbart News.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.