The Trump administration’s latest move against legal immigration bars eight companies, Microsoft among them, from sponsoring their employees for green cards. The companies have been suspended from the permanent labor certification process, known as PERM, which is the most common route by which workers on temporary H-1B visas obtain permanent legal status. The administration accuses the companies of abusing the process, a charge several of them, including Microsoft, contest.
Time reports:
Microsoft and software maker Adobe are among eight companies that the Trump Administration will suspend from applying to sponsor employment-based green cards. The other companies are major information technology outsourcing firms: Cognizant; Infosys; Tata Consultancy Services; Wipro; HCL Technologies; and Capgemini. “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said. ...
[Vice President] Vance said the suspensions would last “as long as it needs to.” The Administration is seeking to compel the companies to change their behavior. Vance accused companies of deliberately posting ineffective job ads in order to justify hiring foreign workers. “Maybe they’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that we have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it. And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.
If H-1B workers really are indentured servants, the administration has chosen a curious remedy. A green card is precisely what frees an H-1B worker to change jobs and demand higher pay, so blocking companies from sponsoring their own employees for one leaves those workers more dependent on their employers than before.
The Trump administration’s immigration policy has always had two prongs. The first is a loud, public focus on illegal immigration, border chaos, and criminal behavior (real or fictional) by migrants. The second is a quiet, bureaucratic assault on as many pathways for legal immigration as the administration can shut down. At the same press conference where Vance announced the green card suspensions, officials announced subpoenas to nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over their use of J-1 exchange visas. A day earlier, the Department of Homeland Security proposed charging colleges $70,000 for each student in the program that lets international students work in their field during or after their studies. With the first prong increasingly unpopular in public polling, the administration is leaning harder on the second. Even if Democrats win back power in the midterm elections, they will have a lot of work to do to protect and restore America’s legal immigration pathways.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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