Judge Blocks Trump’s Attempt To Rein In H-1B Visa Program

President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict H-1B visas was blocked by a federal judge on Monday, who said it was an unlawful tax. 

Judge Leo Sorokin of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts ruled that Trump’s policy violated both the federal Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution. “It encroaches upon Congress’s exclusive power to tax under the Constitution,” the court documents stated. 

Last September, Trump imposed a $100,000 H-1B application fee in an attempt to limit the number of foreign workers in the United States. The previous cost per application ranged from $2,000 to $5,000.

Sorokin sided with the 20 Democrat-led states that brought legal action against the various departments involved, saying it “exceeds the carefully and explicitly limited fee-setting authority delegated to the executive branch by Congress.”

The Trump administration is expected to appeal this ruling.

The H-1B program was originally created in 1990 to allow American employers to temporarily hire skilled workers from other countries for up to six years. Tech and finance companies rely heavily on immigrants’ skills. According to Trump’s directive, between 2000 and 2019, foreign STEM workers in the United States increased from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, with an overall STEM employment increase of 44.5%. The Guardian reported that roughly two-thirds of H-1B jobs are computer-related.

Trump believes the program “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.” The president argued that employers are abusing the H-1B program to “artificially suppress wages, resulting in a disadvantageous labor market for American citizens.”

“President Trump has clear legal authority to restrict entry of any class of aliens he determines is not in America’s best interests, and that is exactly what he did,” Taylor Rogers, the White House spokeswoman, told CNBC after the court’s ruling.

Trump also argued that the abuse of the H-1B program makes it significantly more difficult for college graduates to obtain IT jobs because employers are hiring “foreign workers at a significant discount to American workers.”