President Donald Trump’s administration is promoting a regulation to replace the lottery-based allocation system for the controversial H-1B visa with a salary-based process, but the change may not remain under President-elect Joe Biden’s next administration.
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services published the new rule on Thursday and are expected to officially publish it tomorrow.
It would issue H-1B visas – intended for jobs that require specialized skills – based on the worker’s salary, with the highest paid jobs being given priority.
The Trump administration cracked down on the H-1B program, dramatically increasing visa denial for recruitment and outsourcing companies that hire foreign workers. Critics have accused these companies and their client firms of using H-1B to supplant American workers, cut wages and send jobs abroad. Major technology companies, which hire H-1B workers directly as well as through recruitment firms, are pushing to expand the annual limit of 85,000 new visas, arguing that the visa is necessary to guarantee the best talent in the world.
Research by the Economic Policy Institute and Professor Ron Hira of Howard University, who studies H-1B, found that in 2019 IT staffing companies like Infosys, Deloitte and Cognizant had signed up for a large number of H employees -1B the lowest salary levels, while Bay Area tech giants Google, Apple, Cisco and Oracle had a mix of upper and lower levels.
A Biden spokeswoman said at the end of last month that her government would suspend or delay all regulations issued by the Trump administration in its final days.