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Trump Freezes Green Cards and Work Visas For Best and Brightest
The administration continues to use the pandemic to advance Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s long-standing anti-immigrant, white nationalist agenda. Shameful.
Trump on Monday [6/22/20] extended a freeze on green cards for new immigrants and signed an executive order to suspend new H-1B, L-1, J and other temporary work visas for skilled workers, managers and au pairs through the end of the year.
The order extends restrictions originally enacted in April due to the coronavirus pandemic, which blocked most people from receiving a permanent residency visa, or green card. The new order also temporarily freezes H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, a program popular with the U.S. tech industry, and other temporary work visas.
Apologies for restating this, but this is simply using a global pandemic to realize their xenophobic dreams. They even admit it:
The Trump administration is arguing the immigration restrictions are necessary to protect American jobs during a period of historic unemployment, the result of...the spread of Covid-19...
Business interests, however, lobbied hard against the restrictions, arguing they will cause more, not less, economic pain across the country... raised significant concerns among business and industry groups.
"The ban on H-1B visas, which are often used to fill very niche positions that are not easily found in the American workforce, will ultimately prove to be counterproductive and is an example of using a nuclear bomb to address a bar fight," said Leon Fresco, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama administration who now represents H-1B workers.
The damage from this will be enormous. It could dismantle our ability to attract and retain the best science and engineering talent from across the planet.
Rather than strengthening the U.S. economy and enhancing security, these restrictions would be a serious blow to the United States’ lead in cutting-edge technologies. The only way for the United States to stay ahead of China is to run faster in the technology race, and the ability to recruit and retain many of the top scientific minds from China and many other countries provides an enormous head start.
The big magnet for the world’s talent is U.S. universities. Top prospects from around the globe come here to do graduate research, and are then enticed to stay by the abundant work opportunities.
....the lure of the United States has been so great that the best and brightest usually find a way to stay. According to the most recent estimates, more than 75 percent of foreign-born doctoral students in engineering and science at U.S. universities plan to remain in the country after they graduate, a share that has risen steadily since the 1990s.
Sources:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/18/trump-immigration-h-1b-visas-technology-workers-recovery/