The Trump administration’s announcement on Thursday that it was suspending federal visa sponsorship programs for Microsoft and Adobe has reverberated across the technology industry.
Immigration attorneys told Business Insider that employees on H-1B visas working at Microsoft, Adobe and other designated technology companies should seek counseling and clarify their status under the suspension.
Individual cases may vary, and attorneys speak in general terms about the advice they would provide without knowing the client’s specific circumstances or circumstances.
“This is a time when immigrants, high-skilled immigrants, really need to pay attention to the law,” said Tahmina Watson, a business immigration attorney at Watson Immigration Law in Seattle. “Things are changing in an instant,” she added.
Following the announcement, Business Insider spoke to eight immigration attorneys on Thursday as part of our ongoing series “The Impact of H-1B: One Year Later,” which explores how foreign workers are coping with the rapidly changing U.S. immigration landscape.
Some immigration lawyers said the suspension could be challenged in court. Others said it was the latest in a series of U.S. measures targeting foreign workers. One lawyer said they would only affect a relatively small group of workers.
“Most people are either able to wait or have time to change jobs,” said Loren Lock, an attorney at Locke Immigration Law in Atlanta.
The Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program, the first step that employers typically must complete before sponsoring a worker for an employment visa, requires them to demonstrate that there are no qualified and available U.S. workers to fill the position.
Vice President J.D. Vance said at a news conference Thursday that Microsoft had “abused” the system by firing U.S. workers and using it to hire foreign workers, who he said were paid lower salaries. “If you do the math, every time Microsoft fires an employee, it replaces that employee with a semi-foreign contract worker,” Vance said.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider blog post “The vast majority of Microsoft’s U.S. employees are Americans,” the company said in a statement Thursday. The company said its H-1B workers are paid “the same as any other employee doing similar work.”
Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella accepted the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Donald Trump on Thursday — just hours after Microsoft suspended its visa program. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said at a news conference that the government will not accept any new PERM applications or process any pending applications from designated companies, which include technology outsourcing companies in addition to Microsoft and Adobe. Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini.
The importance of knowing your status
Immigration attorney Matthew Maiona said that by suspending new and pending PERM applications, the Trump administration has put a very specific group of H-1B visa holders in a difficult position. In Mahona District In Boston.
In theory, a hypothetical Microsoft or Adobe employee six years after receiving an H-1B visa could now be ordered to appear in immigration court under the new moratorium, Maiona said.
“If you don’t qualify for another non-immigrant visa category, you could get into trouble,” Mahona said. “You may have to leave the United States.”
But Locke said workers only face the possibility of deportation if they exhaust their H-1B eligibility and are unable to obtain an extension or other legal basis (of which there are several) to stay in the United States.
She said that while the legal maximum length of an H-1B visa is six years, it can be extended beyond that if the worker makes enough progress toward obtaining a green card.
“If the goal is to crush H-1B workers, that’s not great, but it’s not really crushing them either,” Locke said.
Boston-based immigration attorney Todd Pomerleau said that because of uncertainty about the scope and enforcement of the moratorium, “anyone concerned about their immigration status needs to seek competent counsel.”
‘We’re going to start seeing lawsuits’
Some immigration attorneys who spoke to Business Insider said they expect the Trump administration’s move will be challenged in a lawsuit that will argue that the moratorium exceeds the Labor Department’s legal authority.
“I think by next week we’ll start to see lawsuits,” said Kripa Upadhyay, co-chairman of Buchalter’s Immigration and Global Mobility practice in Seattle.
Ted Chiappari, head of immigration law at Duane Morris LLP, said federal regulations only allow the Department of Labor to unilaterally suspend an employer’s use of the PERM program for 180 days.
“This lets employers know that an investigation is ongoing and at the end of that investigation, if they find something inappropriate, they have six years to decide whether to ban the employer,” he said.
Even then, they can only ban an employer for a maximum of three years, Chiapari said.
Only the latest H-1B side
Few lawyers who spoke to Business Insider said they were surprised by the measure. Mostly, they see it as another step in the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown on foreign workers.
Upadhyay said that just the day before, she spoke with a Microsoft employee who held an H-1B and whose spouse also held an H-1B.
The person’s H-1B extension is about to expire, and they now face the “impossible decision” to leave their spouse and two U.S. citizen children and move back to their home country.
“I have children to feed,” Upadhyay recalled the worker saying. “What’s happening now?”
Upadhyay expects to receive more such calls.