COLLEGE STATION, Texas — President Trump is suspending five different kinds of visas until 2021 in an attempt to preserve the American economy. This order will not allow new visas until next year.
“He’s using a sledgehammer to crack open this walnut and he’s going to destroy the whole thing in the process. It could mean as many as half a million people would not be continuing working. These are foreign workers so the reason why this is important obviously is the H-1B visa program [which] targets skilled workers. These are mainly people with a Bachelors degree who have very specific technical skills. They may be working at tech companies or whatever, but basically the idea is they are shutting off this program to reduce the number of foreign workers in the United States," said Texas A&M Bush School professor Raymond Robertson.
White house officials say the visa suspension is in an effort to keep more jobs for American citizens, especially with the high unemployment rate at the moment.
“On the other hand, what tech companies are arguing is that the program usually actually has a limit of 65 thousand workers a year and these are people that are highly skilled, and a lot of them come from U.S. universities and they are trained in the U.S. They know the country and they’re on their way perhaps to citizenship. They have skills that companies need, so the idea that of the H-1B visa program is that it allows companies to hire workers that they couldn’t find in the United States," said Robertson.
Courtney Collard, a Texas A&M graduate student currently here from Canada on a student visa, applied for a work permit during her last semester to stay and work in the United States.
“The really tricky thing about the H-1B is that it only opens during certain times of the year and they sell out of them. So that’s already a tricky line to tow because if you were in the country and you wanted to be in the country more permanently for example for myself, my work permit is going to expire within the next year of graduation. If I had a job I were to remain in, I would probably look to an H-1B or another more permanent solution," said Collard.
While Collard is waiting for her work permit, she does not yet know how this order will affect her in the long run.
“Provided that this order does expire when it’s set to, I should be able to pick up work where I should be picking up anyways. However, there are so many factors that have to be considered, such as how many more people are going to be delayed in applying for the same visa that I would be applying to, that maybe they run out before my application goes through because all of those people have been backlogged," said Collard.
This order is an add on to another visa suspension that passed two months ago.
This visa suspension will not only affect highly skilled workers in tech, but also for certain visa holder’s spouses, work/student exchanges and more.