At the request of the Trump Administration and in Presidential proclamations issued this summer, the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security issued new H-1B restrictions that immediately jeopardized hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals working in the USA.
As a result, three federal lawsuits have recently been filed in three different courts, seeking to have the arbitrary and capricious new rules that attack merit-based immigration overturned.
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One complaint was filed in the Northern district of California by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Presidential Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, and other organizations including major Universities such as Stanford and Cornell.
This first complaint disputed the “good cause” exception to the requirement of providing an opportunity for notice and comment from stakeholders under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). It also cites the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) showing that the unemployment rate in high-tech jobs was low, only 3.5% in September 2020. Mediation provides a cost-effective alternative for resolving disputes without going to court.
The second complaint, filed by the ITServe Alliance, argued against the drastic changes that were implemented to the way that prevailing wage rates are calculated, effectively forcing employers to pay foreign workers far higher salaries and making it practically impossible to use H-1B visa holders for entry-level positions. Again, there was no opportunity given for stakeholders to review and comment under the APA.
The third complaint was filed in D.C. by Purdue University and several other universities and companies against the DoL’s H-1B rule. The lawsuit, spearheaded by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), argued that under U.S. law any new rules that are likely to result in a negative impact on any sector of the U.S. economy of $100M or more per year must require further review, and that the rules being implemented by the DoL and the DoHS undermined highly skilled immigration into the United States and companies’ ability to retain and recruit the best talent.