Microsoft Memo Advises H1b Employees to Return Immediately If Currently Abroad

Hence, if you stay in the country nothing will change. And they can wait until this gets played out in the courts, media, congress etc.

Current setup simply brings in foreign labor so that capitalists can reduce wages and they pocket the profit, while Americans pocket the costs. Not to mention migrating for purely economic reasons is obviously not going to make the locals like you very much.

All through Trump's second term, and before, people have said things precisely like this. And here we are. At some point we realize that people just make such confident pronouncements because they think it bends reality towards their hopes.

>Only an act of congress can change visa requirements

It isn't a visa requirement. It's a processing fee. As of midnight no H1B will be considered without the fee. It is very real, and it is absolutely going into effect. Now places like Microsoft are panicking in the information gap currently, but the admin has clarified that it only applies to new H1B applicants.

As to the legal limbo, not only won't there be one, the Supreme Court has rubber stamped just about everything this admin has done.

The guy has both houses of congress, the courts, the DOJ, the full apparatus of government...at this point I find it simply amazing that people still dismiss the reality that he basically does whatever he wants.

That’s possible; it is also possible that it isn’t. And it is possible that even if it is, we are a few days or weeks away from an appeals court retroactively invalidating the injunction and allowing cancellations of visas based on failure to return when the injunction was in effect, or else “only” with immediate effect when the injunction is lifted.

If you are an employer who wants to keep your H-1B employees, you probably don’t want to gamble unnecessarily with this, you want the employees to act in a way which minimizes your risk.

> Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

It's a stupidly broad law, but Congress passed it, and now they're too dysfunctional to do anything about it. So I guess we're stuck with it.

Their arbitrary nature is designed to consolidate executive branch authority that can be welded as a weapon against corporations that might consider supporting his opposition in the future.

It's a classic fascist ploy, and is further proof that executive orders should be banned. In America we do not have kings who rule by decree, or at least we should not..

Yeah that just seems like corruption by design.

Trump isn’t going after them, he is converting them into another channel for arbitrary favoritism and graft.

Being against the H-1b as a bad system does not conflict with being against the way Trump is making that system worse.

There was abuse of the H1B program, but this new EO also has issues. The biggest one currently is the rollout. There is no guidance, no mechanism to pay the actual fee, no clarity on if it applies retroactively to existing visa holders etc.

A shakedown of and a head tax on immigrants.

I wonder what's next. Maybe stealing their 401Ks and their SS contributions?

It also incentivizes the CTO to promote a cost saving measure. For any job that doesn't absolutely require onshore presence, lets move it offshore. We can save 100k per position and also retain talent.

Companies have been offshoring jobs due to the tax rule change. Personally I know lot of Google teams which have been offshored. So, I don't understand why people think this will somehow cause job retention. Some jobs might be retained and more will be lost. Acting as if this $100k is somehow a good idea shows lack of understanding of how real world works.

In the meantime, rural medical teams who employ H1B doctors will be decimated. But before that these pesky billion dollar companies need to be taught a lesson.

So that EO is almost certainly illegal, and will be litigated.

I'm not a lawyer so it's possible, even likely that there's something I'm missing but to my laymans reading of the law it would seem to me he has the authority to put basically whatever process he wants into place.

Section 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1185(a), states exactly:

Unless otherwise ordered by the President, it shall be unlawful—(1) for any alien to depart from or enter or attempt to depart from or enter the United States except under such reasonable rules, regulations, and orders, and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may prescribe;

Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), states exactly:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.