This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Today is the start of this year’s H-1B season. Many groups that supported President Trump have been urging him to replace the purely random visa lottery with one that emphasizes wages and skills. A change in the lottery process could easily have been implemented before this year’s H-1B season and it would have demonstrated that the president intends to take action on the H-1B cesspool.
It is not clear that President Trump will do anything about the allocation of H-1B visas this year. This is a great disappointment. This is an issue the president campaigned on. It is an issue he won on. Doing something about the H-1B lottery would have been an easy win for the president. And the press is already mocking the president over this failure.
But I am not panicking — yet.
I know there is a chorus out there saying that President Trump’s failure to act here was a betrayal of his supporters.
But let me put things into perspective:
President Trump has been in office fewer than three months.
President Trump does not yet even control the agencies involved because of confirmation delays.
Much of what needs to be done requires regulation changes, a process that takes months.
H-1B wages are already so low that changing the lottery would only have had a small impact.
In fact, the worst scenario in my mind was that President Trump might change the H-1B lottery, proclaim victory, and not do anything substantial on H-1B.
With this deadline passed, we need to start talking about the next steps. The highest priority items in regulation should be to shorten the duration of H-1B from two three-year terms (a total of six years) to one two-year term with a one-year extension (a total of three years) and to rescind the Obama-era regulations designed to undermine protections for American workers. I have a long list of action items for the various agencies to take on H-1B and other guestworker programs.
I am calling the president’s failure to do something before today “a BIG missed opportunity”. However, I am going to give President Trump at least a year before I start questioning the commitment he made during the campaign to reform the H-1B cesspool.
Nonetheless, we need to hold the president’s feet to the fire and let him know that we are watching.
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