Is Donald Trump going to stop work visas in the United States?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri.
The Wall Street Journal issued a report last week that said that the president is going to try to expand his ban on immigrants coming to the United States, to include H1B workers.
You recall a few weeks ago, the President tweeted out that he was going to stop immigration until things get back to normal in the economy. And then he sort of walked it back and eventually just targeted people like the parents of U.S. citizens, the spouses and children of green card holders, all these kinds of categories.
But he did not go so far as to ban H1B workers. The H1B visa is the visa that's available for foreign nationals who have a specialty occupation like accountants or lawyers or software developers, those kinds of people to get a visa to the United States to actually work.
And the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the President and Stephen Miller plan to expand the executive order, to issue a new executive order specifically to foreign workers.
The thought is that even though they haven't been able to get Congress to pass any of this harsh anti-immigrant legislation, that because the American people are suffering that because unemployment's at a higher rate and because of the pandemic caused by the coronavirus and the president's poor handling of same, they believe that the American people are ripe for supporting a ban on allowing immigrants to come to the work to the United States.
So we haven't seen the order yet. No one has seen the order yet. I'm sure that the president and his minions are drafting it as we speak. As soon as the order comes out, we will issue it, or we will talk about it. But it's thought that the visas are going to target H1B workers and H2B workers, which are seasonal workers.
So that'll be an interesting thing to watch too, because with his hotels and his other golf resorts and other properties, the President and his companies are big time users of the H2B visa. So it's interesting that he was originally going to include these in the ban.
Then he did not put them in the band. And now we're getting news reports. You know, the government likes to float these trial balloons to see what the public reaction is.
And so far there's been very little litigation over the President's ban of family members that I mentioned those groups earlier. We do have a case ourselves, here in the office, where we're challenging that.
But other than that, there's been no litigation over that. So the President and the bullies that run the Department of Homeland Security, they are always going to push for more and more power. And so they're trying to stretch the law as far and as widely as they can.
And so we will report back to you if that order goes into effect.
I'm sure it has a lot of people concerned. We've been seeing a lot more difficulty in getting H1B's approved, both for extensions and for new H1B's. So this is nothing new.
It's sort of a variation on a theme. We'll wait and see what the order says, and we'll see how the President tries to frame it.
If you have questions about this, about President Trump's plans, be sure to stay tuned. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so that you get updates whenever we make videos like this one.
Also joined us in our Facebook group. We have over 2000 members now it's called Immigrant Home. We'd love to have you in there. If you have any questions, you can give us a call at (314) 961-8200, and you can always email us at [email protected] Thanks a lot and have a great day.