Homeland Security officials said the H-1B visa program needed modernizing.
The Biden administration announced a rule change on who can apply for a H-1B work visa, a key U.S. visa program that employs foreign workers in specialty occupations generally requiring a college degree.
A number of major U.S. technology companies use H-1B visas to find people to work jobs that are deemed hard to fill, namely in science, technology, engineering, and math.
“The H-1B program was created by Congress in 1990, and there’s no question it needed to be modernized to support our nation’s growing economy,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ur M. Jaddou said in a statement. “The changes made in today’s final rule will ensure that U.S. employers can hire the highly skilled workers they need to grow and innovate while enhancing the integrity of the program.”
The rule will also attempt to provide more “flexibilities” for companies by “modernizing the definition and criteria for specialty occupation positions as well as for nonprofit and governmental research organizations that are exempt from the annual statutory limit on H-1B visas,” according to a DHS statement.
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It will also extend “certain flexibilities” for some students on F-1 visas who are trying to change their visa statuses to H-1B to avoid immigration-related disruptions, the agency said.
The DHS rule will also strengthen USCIS’s legal authority to carry out investigations to impose penalties for individuals or organizations who do not comply with the rule, mandating that a company must show it has a legitimate specialty job available for the H-1B visa holder.
The rule also will clarify that the visa petitioner must have a “legal presence and be subject to legal processes in court in the United States,” the agency said.
“American businesses rely on the H-1B visa program for the recruitment of highly-skilled talent, benefitting communities across the country,” Mayorkas said. “These improvements to the program provide employers with greater flexibility to hire global talent, boost our economic competitiveness, and allow highly skilled workers to continue to advance American innovation.”
While President-elect Donald Trump, who’s slated to take office in just over a month, has proposed sweeping immigration overhauls, including mass deportations of illegal immigrants, he has signaled that he would be open to giving automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges.
Earlier this year, on the campaign trail, Trump said that people who are immigrants who graduate from American colleges “should get automatically as part of [their] diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country,” including junior colleges.
In the 2016 election, Trump was largely critical of H-1B visas, saying the program is “very bad” and “unfair” to American workers.
“First of all, I think and I know the H-1B very well. And it’s something that I frankly use and I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have it,” he said at one point in a 2016 debate. “Second of all, I think it’s very important to say, well, I’m a businessman and I have to do what I have to do.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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