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President Donald Trump’s administration is pushing forward 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 hold up under the president’s new administration elected Joe Biden.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released the new rule on Thursday and is expected to officially release it tomorrow.
It would issue H-1B visas – intended for jobs requiring specialized skills – on the basis of workers’ wages, with higher paying positions given priority.
The Trump administration has cracked down on the H-1B program, dramatically increasing visa denials for recruiting companies and contractors who outsource foreign workers. Critics have accused these companies and their corporate clients of using the H-1B to supplant American workers, lower wages and send jobs overseas. Big tech companies, which hire H-1B workers directly and also through recruiting companies, are pushing to increase the annual cap to 85,000 new visas, arguing that the visa is needed to secure the world’s top talent.
Research by the Left Economic Policy Institute and Howard University’s Professor Ron Hira, who studies H-1B, found that in 2019, IT staffing companies such as Infosys, Deloitte and Cognizant had applied for large numbers of H-1B workers at the second-lowest pay levels, while Bay Area tech giants Google, Apple, Cisco and Oracle had a mix of levels higher and lower.
A spokeswoman for Biden said late last month that her administration would suspend or delay all regulations issued by the Trump administration in its final days.
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