Agency Officials Offer Surprise Giveaway to 400,000 Indian, Chinese White-Collar Visa Workers
President Donald Trump’s deputies at the departments of state and homeland security are offering a huge giveaway to at least 400,000 foreign visa workers and their Fortune 500 employers just before the November election.
“This is the news that a lot of people have been waiting for a long time,” Greg Siskind, an immigration lawyer in Memphis, TN, said about the State Department’s giveaway.
The simultaneous giveaway by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a “crazy [good] thing,” he said on September 24. But he warned that agency officials may quickly suspend their action once they see how many Indian visa workers will claim the surprise benefit. “Good times,” he tweeted.
“The people who are getting screwed are likely Trump voters,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “This policy is sticking a knife in the back of [college graduate] people who would be his supporters.”
Trump can quickly reverse his deputies’ hidden, pre-election giveaway, said Vaughan, “if he finds out about it.”
The pre-election giveaway has two parts.
The State Department is offering green cards to roughly 120,000 additional visa workers because they took jobs needed by college graduate Americans. The offer was made on September 24, in the October 2020 Visa Bulletin, and it allows the visa workers to get the roughly 120,000 green cards that were originally allocated to family migrants who have been blocked by the coronavirus shutdown. The extra green cards are above the normal award of 140,000 to foreign employees of U.S. companies.
The second and bigger giveaway is by the officials at the Department of Homeland Security. They have offered early “filing” approval to many people in the huge backlog of Chinese and Indian visa workers. This giveaway means that Indian visa workers who asked for green cards before January 2015, via the EB-3 track for ordinary, inexperienced workers, can get the job market equivalent of a green card from Trump’s DHS deputies. That prize is a renewable work permit, dubbed an “Employment Authorization Document,” also called a “green card lite.”
“It’s a huge benefit,” said Siskind. “It is not a green card, but it is damn near close.”
DHS officials can start the green card lite giveaway on October 1.
But DHS officials are free to quickly cancel their voluntary giveaway, Siskind warned. “Get that [application request] stuff to them as quickly as you can,” he told Indian visa workers in an online presentation, adding that an additional 300,000 experienced Indian workers may switch from the EB-2 immigration track to grab the DHS benefit for lower-skilled EB-3 workers.
“Trump could stop this if he wanted to,” said a September 24 statement from U.S. Tech Workers, which represents U.S. white-collar professionals. “He just needs to instruct [DHS] to not adhere to the Filing chart published by the State Dept.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/25/agency-officials-100000s-indian-chinese-white-collar-visa-workers/