California led 20 states in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to limit the number of H-1B visas.
All 20 states involved in the lawsuit are led by Democratic attorneys general, who claim that Trump’s $100,000 visa fee for high-skilled immigrants oversteps the executive branch’s authority. California is one of the foremost users of the program due to Silicon Valley’s reliance on it.
“No presidential administration can rewrite immigration law,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a Friday press conference in San Francisco. “No president can ignore the coequal branch of government of Congress, ignore the Constitution, or ignore the law.”
Other Democratic attorneys general stressed their belief that H-1B visas were critical for innovation.
“Oregon’s colleges, universities, and research institutions rely on skilled international workers to keep labs running, courses on track, and innovation moving forward,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said in a statement. “This threatens Oregon’s ability to compete, educate, and grow.”
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers defended the president’s actions regarding the visa program, telling Politico they were both lawful and “a necessary, initial, incremental step towards necessary reforms to the H-1B program.”
“President Trump promised to put American workers first, and his commonsense action on H-1B visas does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down American wages, while providing certainty to employers who need to bring the best talent from overseas,” Rogers said in a statement responding to the lawsuit.
H-1B visas have been a sore topic within Trump’s new coalition, being popular among his Big Tech backers but vehemently opposed among his populist base. The president has tried to appeal to both sides, speaking in support of the program while taking measures to crack down on its reliance and fraud within it.
LABOR DEPARTMENT UNVEILS ‘PROJECT FIREWALL’ TO REPRIMAND EMPLOYERS WHO ‘ABUSE’ H-1B VISAS
Hours after the lawsuit dropped, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer posted a clip of her discussing the Labor Department’s Project Firewall, which aims to crack down on abuses within the H-1B program.
“Everything that I do at the Department of Labor is to protect the American workforce,” she said. “So we have almost 200 investigations happening now that we have deployed, but Project Firewall was specific to the H-1B visa program. We want to make sure that we’re not depressing American wages, that we’re working very hard to protect American jobs, and that there is room for an H-1B visa program, but we want our companies to comply with the law.”
