A federal judge on Tuesday struck down two Trump administration rules designed to drastically reduce the number of visas issued each year to skilled foreign workers.
Changes to the H-1B visa program announced in October include imposing salary requirements on companies that employ skilled foreign workers and limits on specialty occupations. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security made it a priority due to coronavirus-related job losses and estimated that as many as a third of those who have applied for H-1B in recent years would be denied under the new rules.
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US District Judge Jeffrey White in California said the government did not follow transparency procedures and his claim that the changes were an emergency response to job losses from the pandemic did not hold up because the Trump administration has raised the idea. for some time, but only published the rules in October.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is an event beyond the control of the defendants, yet it was within the control of the defendants to take action before them,” White wrote.
The United States issues up to 85,000 H-1B visas each year in sectors including technology, engineering and medicine. They are generally issued for three years and are renewable. Most of the nearly 600,000 H-1B visa holders in the US are from India and China.
The H-1B rules announced weeks before the election were part of President Donald Trump’s broader agenda to curb nearly all forms of immigration. In June, he issued a temporary suspension order from the H-1B program until the end of the year.
The US Chamber of Commerce and universities, including the California Institute of Technology, filed a lawsuit in California, arguing that there was not adequate notice or time for the public to comment on the changes. They also said the rules, particularly related to requiring a prevailing wage for visa holders, would have a drastic impact on new hires and “break the employment relationship of hundreds of thousands of existing employees in the United States.”
The University of Utah cited an example where an H-1B employee seeking renewal received a salary of $ 80,000 but would have to receive $ 208,000 under the new rule.
The judge agreed that the federal government did not defend the implementation of the rules under the Administrative Procedure Act, which holds agencies accountable to the public by requiring a detailed process for the promulgation of regulations.
“The defendants failed to demonstrate that there was good reason to dispense with the thoughtful and rational speech provided by the APA’s notice and comment requirements,” White wrote.
The rule on wages, proposed by the Department of Labor, took effect in October, while the Homeland Security rule on occupations and other matters was supposed to take effect on Monday. It would also have put limits on “outside” companies that employ and hire H-1B visa holders with other companies, their visas would have been limited to one year at a time.
“This is an incredibly important decision to preserve the H-1B program,” said attorney Paul Hughes, who represented the plaintiffs. “This ruling allows those people to keep their jobs and their families in the United States.”
The Chamber of Commerce said in a statement that the ruling “has many companies from various industries heaving a great sigh of relief,” and that the visa changes have “the potential to be incredibly disruptive to the operations of many companies.”
Messages sent Tuesday to spokespersons for the departments of Labor and Homeland Security were not immediately returned.
The wage rule has sparked at least two other federal lawsuits in New Jersey and Washington, DC
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