US President Joe Biden on Thursday revoked Donald Trump’s rule ending work permits for spouses of H1-B visa holders. The spouses of H1-B visa holders posses H4 visa that is issued by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USICS) to immediate family members. Most of the H4 visa holders are highly skilled spouses of Indian IT professionals.
The H1-B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to hire foreign workers with technical expertise. The technology companies depend on the H1-B visa to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.The H4 visa is normally issued to those who have already started the process of seeking employment-based lawful permanent resident status in the US.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on Monday said the proposed rule titled, Removing H-4 Dependent Spouses from the Class of Aliens Eligible for Employment Authorisation, was being withdrawn.
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The measure had been brought in during the Barack Obama presidency in 2015. Spouses of Indian professionals on H-1B visas, mostly women, are the biggest beneficiary of the Obama-era rule that gave employment authorisation cards.
But, soon after the Trump administration came into power in 2017, Trump announced that he would rescind that Obama-era rule. However, the Trump administration was not able to complete the process in the four year of its rule. During the presidential election, the Biden campaign had promised to withdraw the Trump administration’s rule rescinding work authorisation to H4 visa holders. Soon after his electoral victory, a group of 60 members of the US House of Representatives in a letter urged Biden to unilaterally extend the expiration of work authorisation documents for H4 visa holders.
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The letter said the US House of Representatives respectfully request that the Department of Homeland Security publish a Federal Register notice on day one of your administration that would extend the validity period of all expired H4 EADs (Employment Authorisation Document), the members of Congress wrote to Biden in a letter on December 16. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a rule allowing certain H4 dependent spouses of H-1B visa holders to legally seek employment in the US, the letter said.