Trump administration Call it spousal abuse. More than 125,000 working spouses of immigrants, mainly Indians, remain on tenterhooks after the department of homeland security told a federal court on Friday that its decision to revoke work permits to H-4 visa-holders is on track and new rules would be announced within three months. In its latest court filing in response to a suit filed by Save Jobs USA, a group claiming to represent US workers affected by the previous administration’s expansive immigrant worker policies, the DHS told the US district court in District of Columbia that it was “making solid and swift progress in proposing to remove from its regulations on certain H-4 spouses of H-1B non-immigrants as a class of aliens eligible for employment authorisation”..
Such a rule revision will reverse the hard-won authorisation, approved by the Obama administration three years ago, that allows spouses of H-1B visa guest workers whose green cards are being processed to legally enter the US workforce.
As of December 2017, the US Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) had approved nearly 127,000 H-4 work authorisations, 93% of them to Indians. Trump’s ‘Buy American, Hire American’ plan behind reversal The Obama legacy enabled many well-qualified Indian spouses (mainly women, but also many men) to legally enter the US workforce instead of enforced domesticity while the other spouse went to work
This is is the third time DHS has informed the court about the delay in the issue of notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) — and it is not due to any second thoughts about a rule reversal that will have a profound impact on more than 100,000 families of Indian working professionals in the US. Administration attorneys told the court that it is standard practice within DHS for its senior leadership to review rules and request revisions, and when the exercise is concluded, “USCIS will return the proposed rule to DHS for final clearance and submission to the White House office of budget management”.
DHS has filed three status reports — on February 28, May 22 and August 20. The next is due on November 19. So effectively, more than 100,000 H-1B/H-4 Indian families have just two months of double income security before they are reduced to a single income, forcing some to consider leaving the US — to return to India or migrate elsewhere. For many families, it will be a rough and tense Thanksgiving and Christma
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