Miller Mayer immigration attorney Steve Yale-Loehr was quoted by Education Dive in “How Would Biden’s Immigration Proposals Affect International Students?” Steve said that a President Biden could revoke proposed regulations limiting international student visas to four-year periods and setting up new procedures for extending their stay. However, if the regulations are finalized before President Trump leaves office, a new administration would need to go through the lengthy regulatory process again, unless Congress undoes them through the Congressional Review Act. More pressing, he said, are the pandemic’s effects on international and unauthorized students, and the Department of Education’s refusal to grant them coronavirus relief funding, a decision that could also be reversed.
Steve was quoted by Law360 in “Salary-Based H-1B Visas May Leave Out Foreign Grads.” Commenting on a Trump administration proposed rule to eliminate the H-1B visa lottery and instead award visas to candidates offered the highest salaries, he said, ” I think it is going to hurt innovation because many times it’s the people right out of grad school who have been doing cutting-edge research.”
Steve was quoted by Univision in “El gobierno ya no otorgará al azar las visas H-1B para profesionales extranjeros: te contamos a quién afecta.” He said, “The new rule would eliminate the current random selection system and instead select H-1B workers based on their wages. The highest paid workers would be allowed to file an H-1B petition. But workers offered lower wages may not be able to petition if more than 85,000 higher-wage H-1B workers filed first.” Mr. Yale-Loehr noted that “[b]y effectively increasing the wages of H-1B workers, the proposed rule would hurt all employers trying to hire foreign temporary professional workers, but especially schools, start-ups, and smaller businesses that cannot afford the high wages that Silicon Valley high-tech companies and other large companies offer H-1B workers.” He further said that “the announced rule is based on preserving jobs for American workers. However, the administration does not understand that many nonimmigrant workers, especially highly skilled foreign workers, help the economy grow. For example, one study found that each H-1B worker creates about five jobs for US workers in the tech sector.”