A federal judge on Monday blocked President Trump’s $100,000 H-1B Visa fine.
US District Judge Leo Sorokin, an Obama appointee, said the $100,000 fee is an unauthorized tax.
CNBC reported:
A federal judge on Monday vacated President Donald Trump’s policy imposing a $100,000 fee for employers’ H-1B visa applications.
The visa payment policy violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution, Judge Leo Sorokin declared in the ruling in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.
Sorokin agreed with the plaintiffs in finding “the substance and application of the $100,000 payment reveal that it is a tax,” and that Congress had not delegated that power to the executive branch.
The H-1B policy was created in 1990 and is heavily used by U.S. tech giants to bring in high-skilled workers from overseas. The program allows U.S. employers to seek government permission to hire a nonimmigrant workers in specialty occupations for up to six years.
Last September, President Trump announced new restrictions of certain nonimmigrant workers.
“American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance. This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States,” the White House previously said.
“The abuse of the H-1B program is also a national security threat. Domestic law enforcement agencies have identified and investigated H-1B-reliant outsourcing companies for engaging in visa fraud, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and other illicit activities to encourage foreign workers to come to the United States,” the White House said.
“Further, abuses of the H-1B program present a national security threat by discouraging Americans from pursuing careers in science and technology, risking American leadership in these fields. A 2017 study showed that wages for American computer scientists would have been 2.6 percent to 5.1 percent higher and employment in computer science for American workers would have been 6.1 percent to 10.8 percent higher in 2001 absent the importation of foreign workers into the computer science field,” the White House said.
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