Shomporko Desk:-The Trump administration said Monday that it is expanding a prohibition on green cards gave outside the United States until the year’s end and adding numerous impermanent work visas to the freeze — including those utilized vigorously by technology companies and multinational corporations — hurling a haze of vulnerability more than a huge number of Canadians, including cross-border workers and their families.
The administration gives the exertion a role as an approach to let loose employments in an economy reeling from the coronavirus. A senior authority who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity evaluated the limitations will free up to 525,000 jobs for Americans.
The ban, even as temporary, would add up to a major restructuring of legal immigration if made permanent, an objective that had evaded the administration before the pandemic. Long haul changes focusing on asylum seekers and high-tech workers are also being sought.
There will be exemptions for food processing workers, which make up about 15 per cent of H-2B visas, the official said. Health care workers assisting with the coronavirus fight will continue to be spared from the green-card freeze, though their exemption will be narrower.
“In the administration of our nation’s immigration system, we must remain mindful of the impact of foreign workers on the United States labour market, particularly in the current extraordinary environment of high domestic unemployment and depressed demand for labour,” Trump wrote in his presidential proclamation.
These moves could affect thousands of Canadians. They are far more severe than an earlier immigration announcement from Trump in April, which affected only applications for permanent immigration visas.
The new provisions touch work visas used by many Canadians. Canadians filed more than 4,000 H-1B applications in each of the last two years, and numerous others would get L1 business visas in a normal year, including executives working for cross-border companies.
People potentially affected by the changes were struggling Monday night to untangle the exact effect on their lives. The order left numerous questions unanswered — and even immigration lawyers were racing to unpack the implications.
Trump’s initial 60-day ban on green cards issued abroad was set to expire Monday. That announcement, which largely targeted family members, drew a surprisingly chilly reception from immigration hardliners, who said the president didn’t go far enough.
The new steps to include non-immigrant visas went a long way toward appeasing hardliners.
“This is a bold move by the Trump administration to protect American jobs,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restrictions. “Not all the items on our checklist of needed actions are included in today’s announcement, but the corporate lobbyists who were desperately fighting for exceptions to protect their clients’ access to cheap foreign labour have largely been rebuffed.”
Vaitzner said the administration was using the pandemic as an excuse.
“Trump has wanted to suspend the H-1B program since he started the presidency and he is using the high unemployment rate as a result of COVID as his justification for suspending a program he disliked because it allowed foreign nationals to enter the U.S.,” she said. “His justification for suspending the program is based on some faulty assumptions in my opinion.”
She said those faulty assumptions include the lack of evidence that preventing H-1B applications will create new jobs in the U.S., and could wind up hurting U.S. companies.
Thomas J. Donohue, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief executive officer, also said the measures will harm, not help, the American economy.
A pro-immigration group with strong Silicon Valley backing, FWD.us, said the moves “will not only hinder efforts to save lives but will prevent job creation and hurt our economy as our country struggles to recover.”
The rule against asylum seekers, scheduled to take effect Aug. 25, would make it much more difficult for them to get work permits by, among other things, lengthening the waiting time to apply from 150 days to a year and barring applicants who cross the border illegally.
The 328-page regulation — signed by Chad Mizelle, the U.S. Homeland Security Department’s acting general counsel, who is considered an ally of White House adviser Stephen Miller — says limiting work permits will remove a major incentive for people to come to the United States for asylum.
It is the latest in a long string of measures that make asylum more difficult to get — almost unattainable, according to some immigrant advocacy groups.
Photo credit: GETTY IMAGES
News source: The Associated Press
