If elected president, Donald Trump’s immigration plans could mean international students choose other countries and many aspiring immigrants will be out of luck. Examining Trump’s first term and his advisers’ expected plans for a possible second term indicate that the new policies will have a profound effect on employers, students and highly skilled professionals. Policies may include restricting optional practical training for international students and measures that cause people who wait years for employment-based green cards to leave the United States.

Previous immigration restrictions against international students

Using the federal government to limit or reduce the labor supply has been the operating principle behind many of the Trump administration’s first-term immigration restrictions. Relying on “labor pooling,” which assumes (economists say incorrectly) that new workers must compete for a fixed number of available jobs, the Trump administration blocked the entrance of immigrants and visa holders during the Covid-19 pandemic, placed new immigration barriers for foreign-born scientists and engineers, and enacted other policies.

The Trump administration has placed on the regulatory agenda a rule restricting optional internships that allow international students to gain experience working in their field for 12 months. The Obama administration issued a rule that allowed science, technology, engineering, and math students to extend OPT for an additional 24 months.

The rule was necessitated by legal challenges after the Bush administration introduced STEM OPT. Bush officials hoped that STEM OPT would help the United States attract international students and provide employers and students with additional opportunities to obtain H-1B status in the annual lottery.

The Trump administration has not published its rule to restrict optional practical training. “(White House Senior Counsel Stephen) Miller advocated numerous policies that never became reality, including eliminating a program that allowed international students earning STEM degrees in the U.S. to work for up to three years in the country on their student visas,” he reported Wall Street Journal’s Michelle Hackman. “In those cases, Miller was blocked by more business-oriented members of the administration, particularly Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.” Kushner is not expected to play an official role in a second Trump administration.

To understand Miller’s perspective, it’s helpful to look back S. 2934a bill he drafted in 2015 while working for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). This bill prohibited international students with master’s or bachelor’s degrees from working in the United States in H-1B status without first gaining 10 years of experience in a foreign country, a fundamental change in US immigration policy. Individuals with a Ph.D. from a US university would first have to work two years in another country to be eligible for an H-1B visa. Any employer would then have to overcome other impediments before being allowed to hire him in America.

Miller and other Trump officials may not need to end optional practical training to discourage or prevent international students from working in the United States. They could burden OPT with requirements that make it unbearable for students and employers. This was the H-1B visa model. The Trump administration enacted measures that increased denial rates, costs and uncertainty until judges ruled the policies illegal, forcing a legal settlement. Trump officials also published an H-1B rule that would have made the category unusable for many employers. A court blocked the rule on procedural grounds.

Immigration worries for students in a second Trump term

Trump has floated (on a fundraising podcast) but never promoted an idea to give all international students green cards after they graduate from US universities. The policy is unlikely to be tried during a second Trump administration. Immigration advocates worry about new restrictions affecting international students if Trump becomes president, not the implementation of expansionary policies.

“My biggest concerns are about discouraging international students and scholars from coming to the United States,” said Dan Berger of Green & Spiegel. “During the last Trump administration, the visa process has become more difficult, with increased processing times, longer security checks, and more questions.” He points to the “Muslim ban”, policies during Covid-19 and other measures that have created uncertainty and had “a chilling effect on attracting international talent”.

“A new Trump administration could seek to restrict H-1B work visas in a variety of ways, including higher denial rates, longer processing times, and making eligibility requirements more restrictive,” according to the Cornell Law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr School. an advisor to the National Foundation for American Policy. “Because H-1Bs are a common way international students seek to stay and work in the United States after graduation, any H-1B restrictions would increase their concerns so that they may be less likely to come to the United States in first row place.”

The Trump administration has proposed more restrictions on international students. A court has blocked Trump officials from tightening “unlawful presence” policies for non-immigrant students. The Department of Homeland Security also published a proposed rule to limit study in the United States to a fixed period of admission. This would have caused many international students to potentially leave the US and be ineligible to work in the United States for employers. The Trump administration has banned work on optional hands-on training at third-party locations. It backed down after being sued for changing the policy by editing the DHS website rather than through normal notice-and-comment procedures.

After Stephen Miller argued for the ban on Chinese students from the United States, Trump officials have moved to restrict the entry of many Chinese graduate students, exchange visitors and researchers, a policy maintained by the Biden administration. Trump officials could enact a broader ban on Chinese students in a second term.

How new immigration restrictions could affect green card applicants

The new policies could hurt applicants who wait years for employment-based green cards. Due to the low annual employment-based immigrant visa cap and country cap, over one million Indiansincluding dependents, now expected in the first, second and third employment-based green card categories. United States of America lose talent because of annual limits on H-1B and employment-based immigrant visas, according to Mark Barteau, who chaired a panel on immigration policy for the National Academy of Sciences.

First, Trump officials could prevent people applying for or waiting for employment-based green cards by using regulatory means to take their wages out of the labor market. In 2020, the Department of Labor published a rule which significantly increased the minimum wage employers are required to pay H-1B visa holders and employment-based immigrants through the permanent labor certification process known as PERM. As a result, the DOL rule, in many cases, increased minimum wages by as much as 100 percent, requiring employers to pay $208,000 per year for more than 18,000 combinations of occupations and geographic labor markets, regardless of skill level and position.

A judge blocked the rule because Trump officials could not provide sufficient legal basis to publish it as “interim final,” a designation that allows a rule to take effect immediately without a public comment period. Judges may be less likely to stop a similar rule that inflates salary requirements if officials follow the normal rulemaking process.

The Trump administration has not tried to solve a problem that has existed since the academic days research concluded that H-1B professionals are paid the same or more than comparable US workers. Additionally, along with required salary, government and legal fees can add $30,000 to an employer’s costs for filing an initial H-1B petition and an extension, along with $10,000 to $15,000 for sponsoring an H-1B visa holder for a green card According to USCIS, the median salary for an H-1B visa holder in computer-related occupations in 2023 was $132,000, and the median salary was $122,000.

Second, if denials of H-1B petitions increase, people waiting for green cards may be forced to leave the United States. Under Trump, denial rates of H-1B petitions for continued employment (generally extensions of current visa holders) increased from about 3% to 12% in FY 2018 and FY 2019. A legal settlement in 2020 forced USCIS to stop more of the Trump administration’s actions. practices. That sent denial rates back to pre-Trump levels.

Third, Trump officials in a second term may end or reduce work authorization for spouses of H-1B visa holders awaiting green cards for employment. This would make it difficult for many families to wait years for an employment-based green card. In an April 2018 letter to Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), USCIS Director Francis Cissna pledged to “remove H-4 dependent spouses from the class of aliens eligible for employment authorization, thereby reversing the 2015 final rule that granted such eligibility. “

The Trump administration has not published a rule to stop granting work authorization to spouses, possibly because of an already full immigration agenda. However, he adopted others restrictive measures. “By adding redundant and unnecessary steps and processes, they have succeeded in stalling H-4 and L-2 EAD adjudications,” said Jon Wasden of Wasden Law. “A process that the agency (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) claims takes only 12 minutes ended up taking over a year. A second Trump administration will likely use similar illegal means to achieve its desired policy goals.”

If Donald Trump regains the presidency, international students and employment-based green card applicants may find that Trump’s immigration policies will affect them more deeply than many imagine today.