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Things just became even more complicated for companies employing foreign nationals, and for the people working here on specialized visas. The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday announced the end to automatic extensions of work permits that expire while their renewal applications were being processed. The change means many legal immigrants — and their employers — risk finding themselves stuck in an employment limbo if that documentation expires before it can be renewed.
The move is only the most recent initiative in the government’s efforts to discourage or prevent foreign nationals from taking jobs that President Donald Trump says he wants to keep open for U.S. citizens. The push previously involved reducing the flow of both illegal and authorized immigration into the country, and conducting mass deportations of undocumented people. It also featured hiking the fees for H-1B visas granted to highly-educated and -skilled tech, medical, and STEM workers from a few thousand dollars to $100,000. This week’s additional change means that as of Thursday, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will no longer extend the validity of work permits whose renewal applications are being processed — often very slowly amid the huge backlog of those requests.
The shift marks a dramatic and pointedly politically reversal of previous rules.
Responding to the long delays in the USCIS processing work permit renewals, in May 2022 then-President Joe Biden increased the automatic extension period for those Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) from 180 days to 540 days. At that time, the Wall Street Journal reported the agency was dealing with a bottleneck of 1.5 million applications. Those included renewal requests by “87,000 immigrants whose work authorization has lapsed or is set to in the next 30 days.”
More recently, a Bloomberg Law report on the automatic extension being ended Thursday said that as of June 30, “more than 165,000 renewals were pending for all work permit holders.”
Because most renewal applications are made by immigrants whose work and legal status is in order, they are more often than not approved. Aware of that, Biden’s initiative sought a pragmatic workaround to the long delays processing requests that usually got the green light anyway. The longer automatic grace period let visa holders keep working at their jobs until the swamped USCIS could dig its way out of the its administrative hole.
That approach has now emphatically come to an end.
“USCIS is placing a renewed emphasis on robust alien screening and vetting, eliminating policies the former administration implemented that prioritized aliens’ convenience ahead of Americans’ safety and security,” said agency director Joseph Edlow in Tuesday’s announcement of the change. “It’s a commonsense measure to ensure appropriate vetting and screening has been completed before an alien’s employment authorization or documentation is extended. All aliens must remember that working in the United States is a privilege, not a right.”
That means both those immigrant workers and the businesses employing them risk legal trouble if they continue working together once visas run out during re-processing. While there are limited exemptions to the new rule, the USCIS recommends foreign workers file their “renewal application up to 180 days before their EAD expires.”
Some legal experts suspect that precaution won’t suffice as work permits expire as holders’ renewal requests languish in long processing queues.
“These are individuals who have done nothing wrong on their end,” Shev Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Bloomberg Law. “They’re already working, they’ve already been vetted, they’ve timely filed their paperwork. And they are being punished based on government delays.”
Other labor law experts warn that employers of immigrant workers also risk being penalized when time runs out on working papers under renewal review.
“This will end up having a huge impact on companies who are likely to face labor shortages as their foreign nationals will no longer be authorized to work without the automatic 540-day extension,” Shanon Stevenson, a partner at labor law firm Fisher Phillips, told human relations news site HR Dive. “Foreign nationals can apply for an EAD extension up to 180 days before expiration, but, in my experience, DHS often takes 8-12+ months to process EADs, which leaves a massive 2-6 month lapse in employment authorization.”
In the meantime, those shorthanded companies may have a hard time finding U.S. workers to take up the slack. After all, when employers originally recruited to fill those hard, frequently low-paying jobs in construction, hospitality, healthcare, and agriculture, they often wound up hiring immigrant candidates after few Americans were interested in doing the work.
“The crops will be rotting and won’t be harvested because no Americans want those jobs,” posted Western-Economics946 in a thread on the change on social media platform Reddit. “How is this beneficial to anyone?”
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Bruce Crumley
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