Spouses of H-1B visa holders can work in US, says judge; a large number of Indians to benefit

Washington, March 30

A judge in the US has ruled that spouses of H-1B visa holders, a significantly large number of whom are Indians, can work in the country, in a big relief to foreign workers in the American tech sector who have been struggling to make ends meet.

The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. Technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed a lawsuit filed by Save Jobs USA which had approached the court to dismiss the Obama-era regulation that gave employment authorisation cards to spouses of certain categories of H-1B visa holders.

Save Jobs USA is an organisation comprising IT workers who claim they lost their jobs to H-1B workers. Tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft had opposed the lawsuit. The US has so far issued nearly 1,00,000 work authorisations to spouses of H-1B workers.

In her order, Judge Chutkan said the primary contention of Save Jobs USA is that Congress has never granted the Department of Homeland Security authority to allow foreign nationals, like H-4 visa-holders, to work during their stay in the United States.

But that contention runs headlong into the text of the Immigration and Nationality Act, decades of executive-branch practice and both explicit and implicit congressional ratification of that practice, she wrote.

The judge wrote that Congress has expressly and knowingly empowered the US government to authorise employment as a permissible condition of an H-4 spouse’s stay in the United States.

The fact that the federal government has had longstanding and open responsibility for authorising employment for similar visa classes further manifests Congress’ approval of it exercising that authority, she said.

The Department of Homeland Security and its predecessors have authorised employment not just for students, but also for their spouses and dependents, Judge Chutkan wrote in the ruling.

Also, the Department of Homeland Security has long extended work authorisation to spouses of foreign government officials and spouses of employees or officers of international organisations, the judge wrote as she dismissed the lawsuit filed by Save Jobs USA.