When self-glorifying Trump voters bid their power to make the internationally loathed billionaire the 45th President of the United States of America, they didn't comprehend the abrupt halt that would come in the lives of thousands of immigrants. Sudarshana Sengupta, a successful scientist working on the launch of her start-up, had applied for a permanent residency in the USA.
However, her dreams have been put on hold by the Trump administration's revokal of a rule that allows spouses of "high skilled" foreign workers to hold jobs too. The 43 year old biomedical researcher said she had "followed all the rules, jumped through all the hoops." If put into motion, the move could strip away an estimated 200,000 immigrants of privileges granted by the former Obama government. "I do not want to move back to India just so I can work. I cannot abandon my son and my husband," Sengupta said. The work authorisations for spouses on H4 dependent visas are comparatively more flexible than H1B visas as they aren't bound to a single employer.
The new move comes in response to a lawsuit brought against the federal government by a group of IT workers in California, who claim that the spousal visas were hurting American workers. The previous government had granted work privileges to spouses of high skilled workers from the tech and science industries as an incentive them to complete the green card process and stay in the US.
Several economists are already arguing over the unfairness of the policy. "It's difficult for modern couples to not have spouses who want to work, but it's not in the interest of the American workforce to bring in more workers. Nobody would make the argument that just because you can work, you can come to the United States. That's the situation here, somebody coming in who may not be able to pass the usual hurdle," said economist and management professor at the Wharton School, Peter Cappelli.
A group of IT workers who were laid off by a California utility company and replaced with foreign workers on H1B visas, sued the Department of Homeland Security in 2015. The workers who filed suit as Save Jobs USA, argued that the spousal work authorisation endangered American workers by further increasing competition for employment. Sengupta, along with non-profit group Immigration Voice which is advocating on behalf of high-skilled foreign workers, has filed a motion to intervene in the court case in case Trump administration does not defend the provision.
Ali Noorani, executive director of Washington lobby group National Immigration Forum said, "The administration, and the Department of Justice in particular, is looking for any opportunity to end legal immigration as we know it to the United States. The administration is on track to keep engineers out of the country and really diminish or dismiss the value of their spouses, who are also contributing to the economy."
