Before the ink is dry on his chaotic plan to charge employers a fat fee for hiring foreigners, U.S. President Donald Trump may end up choking off the very pipeline through which young overseas students trickle into the American job market: College education.
The recent and hastily imposed Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers opened a new front in Washington’s increasingly ugly trade spat with New Delhi. Indian techies and doctors, who hold more than 70% of the existing visas under this category, read the move as an eviction notice from their careers and lives in the U.S. Or at least that’s how Trump’s proclamation was received, until the White House clarified that a one-time $100,000 fee on H-1B visas would only apply to employers of new applicants — and doctors may be exempt.
And that was just the other week. A separate proposal, announced soon after, seeks to overhaul the H-1B lottery itself by introducing a wage-based rule into what is currently a random process. The rejig goes way beyond targeting India, or for that matter, the $100,000 fee. Once implemented, it would dim the appeal of the F-1 student visa — a far more crucial source of America’s long-term competitiveness than the 85,000-a-year jobs quota. Although damaging the U.S. university system isn’t the intended goal, that would be the unfortunate result.
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