In a revived lawsuit seeking to kill an Obama-era rule allowing employment for spouses of H-1B visa holders on track for green cards, a lawyer for former tech workers replaced by H-1B holders argued that “entry of aliens into the job market” harms U.S. workers, a report Friday said.
Lawyer John Miano also told court the work authorization for H-4 visa holders was “designed to attract and retain H-1B workers,” according to the report. His statements came during oral arguments Friday in the Save Jobs U.S.A. suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to the report from Bloomberg Law.
The cased had stalled for almost two years until December, after Homeland Security said it was creating a new rule to scrap the work authorization, granted in 2015 under former President Barack Obama. An estimated 100,000 foreign nationals, mostly Indian women according to University of Tennessee researchers, would lose the right to employment. But the agency has several times delayed publishing the rule, most recently saying the earliest it could come would be spring 2020.
Earlier this year, the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents companies including Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, HP, and outsourcers Accenture, Cognizant and Tata, said in a brief to the court that letting H-1B spouses work “has had significant, positive effects on the U.S. economy as a whole” and creates about as many jobs as it takes away.
The plaintiffs in the suit — who had worked in IT for the utility Southern California Edison — claim that H-4 holders compete against Americans for jobs, that the work authorization fails to protect American workers from foreign labor, and that it violates immigration law and exceeds Homeland Security’s authority. The case was thrown out in 2016 but is now under appeal in federal court in Washington, D.C., leaving Homeland Security as the defendant of a federal rule it is currently seeking to scrap under President Donald Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” executive order.
Lawyer Matthew Glover of the U.S. Justice Department, representing Homeland Security in the case, argued in court that Miano hadn’t shown that H-4 spouses directly compete with the former utility workers, Bloomberg Law reported. “Glover said Save Jobs U.S.A. didn’t show that the ‘computer jobs’ the spouses have are the same as the U.S. workers’, or that they are competing in the same California job market,” Bloomberg Law reported. “Judge Thomas B. Griffith also expressed concern that the U.S. workers’ evidence of job competition was all anecdotal despite the opportunity to provide statistics. And Judge David S. Tatel pointed out that all evidence of competition involves H-1B workers, not the spouses with work permits.”
Miano countered that the court had ruled in the past that showing that a rule allowed additional competition for jobs was sufficient, rather than having to prove competition existed, according to Bloomberg Law.
