President Trump’s new moves Monday to suspend several types of work visas are aimed at setting aside over half a million jobs for poor and middle-class Americans laid off during the coronavirus crisis and stopping chain migration, which substantially boosts immigration to the United States.
In expanding his April 26 pause of green cards to multiple types of work visas, the president is “making sure that these jobs go to Americans,” said a senior administration official. The jobs targeted range from mid-level tech positions to crab processing plants to summer jobs at the beach.
The officials said that the move, spelled out in a highly detailed presidential memo to be signed soon, should open up 525,000 jobs that typically go to temporary foreign workers.
“We really have to reduce our unemployment, and the president’s move will help greatly,” the official told Secrets. “We are opening up these jobs for American workers,” added the official one of two briefings on the issue today.
The White House moves, made with the heavy influence of Department of Homeland Security officials including acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, come on top of several other initiatives to crack down on immigration, the continued border wall construction and a massive upheaval of the asylum system abused by illegal immigrants to gain easy access to the nation and its jobs.
And, said another official, the president’s move orders reforms by Homeland Security and the Labor Department of key visas, notably the H-1B visa used by high-tech firms.
“This new action is very meaningful and will be tremendously helpful to American workers. It will open up opportunities for potentially hundreds of thousands of people who have been sidelined by the pandemic shutdown, even temporarily, to pick up jobs — and not only seasonal jobs, but decent permanent knowledge jobs with employers who have found it easier and cheaper to bring in visa workers,” said Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.
She added, “It’s clear that they weren’t looking just to make tweaks, but they went for the most bang for the cut, targeting most of the biggest programs: white-collar visa workers and most seasonal nonfarm workers.”
And a side effect of pausing the issuance of H2-1B, H2-2B, H-4, L-1, and J-1 visas is the temporary end of programs that open the door to relatives of legal migrants in the system called “chain migration,” said Vaughan, an expert on the legal loophole.
“The extension of the pause in certain legal immigration categories is also significant. It postpones the entry of many chain migration arrivals and the visa lottery winners past the end of the year so that in effect, our current legal immigration admissions will be more merit-based and more self-sufficient. It’s a helpful move,” she told Secrets.
Trump officials said that legal immigrants “take away jobs,” and in the current virus-fed unemployment crisis, they want to help Americans. The officials said that many of the jobs will be attractive to low- to middle-income Americans eager to get back to work, especially blacks, Hispanics, and lower-income whites.
One other aspect of the Trump move is to force corporations, especially high-tech firms, to hire Americans instead of foreigners who come in on the visas to work at a lower hourly rate or salary. There was once a need for those workers, but the officials said that corporations are abusing the system.
“We are seeing abuse and foreigners are taking away American jobs,” said the official.
