Donald Trump, campaigning for his re-election on November 3, decided on a new round of migration on Monday with the freezing of green cards and certain work visas until 2021, in the name of the fight against unemployment.
Faced with the brutal destruction of millions of jobs due to containment measures, the Republican president had decided two months ago to suspend for 60 days the issuance of "green cards", which offer permanent resident status to the United United, without touching temporary work visas. A new decree, which he must sign in the afternoon, will extend this "break" until December 31 and this time will include several types of work visas, including the H1-B widely used in the high technology sector , announced a senior official.
At least 525,000 strangers stranded
Also affected are H2B visas reserved for low-skilled workers (with an exception for employees in the food industry), J visas used for student researchers or inter-company transfer visas which are used for certain expatriate contracts.
According to the official, this "pause" should prevent at least 525,000 foreigners from entering American soil and reserve their jobs for Americans. "The president's priority is to get the Americans back to work," he said. In the United States, the unemployment rate jumped to 13.3% of the working population in May, against 3.5% in February, due to the containment measures taken to fight against the pandemic of new coronavirus.
The end of the lottery?
This deterioration of the job market, the death of 120,000 patients of the Covid-19, as well as monster demonstrations against police violence complicate the campaign of Donald Trump, barely in the polls against his democratic rival Joe Biden.
After a disappointing meeting in Oklahoma this weekend, he hopes to bounce back using the springs of his victorious 2016 campaign: the fight against illegal immigration. He will travel to Yuma, Arizona on Tuesday to mark the completion of “200 miles” (320 kilometers) from the wall he had promised to erect on the border with Mexico. At the same time, it intends to reform the legal immigration system, to attract the most qualified foreigners.
Beyond the visa freeze announced on Monday, he ordered his administration to think about a reform of H1-B visas so that in 2021, they will be attributed to foreigners to whom the highest wages have been promised and no longer by lottery. "This will eliminate competition for Americans in entry-level positions and help us attract the best, the most talented," said the senior official.
A "brake" for recovery
These announcements immediately sparked reactions from the antipodes. Republican senator Ted Cruz, close to the president, hailed an "important act". "It is neither a response to the pandemic, nor an economic response", judged on the contrary Andrea Flores of the powerful association for the defense of civil rights ACLU, for whom, "it is an instrumentalization of the pandemic (…) To reshape our migration laws without going through Congress ”.
Unusually, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, usually a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, also criticized the president's decision, saying it would be "a drag on our economic recovery." "Those who think that legal immigration, and particularly work visas, harm the American worker do not understand the American economy," he tweeted.
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