Big Tech Enters Fray To Save Jobs for Spouses of Foreign Workers

Big Tech is wading into a legal fight over visas in an attempt to preserve jobs of spouses of its foreign employees who are working in the U.S. From a report: Amazon.com, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more than 20 other companies and organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on Friday urged a federal court in Washington to reject a lawsuit seeking to eliminate work authorization for more than 90,000 H-4 visa holders. Eliminating H-4 visas "would not only siphon off U.S. gross domestic product, but gift that productivity -- and the innovation that comes with it -- to other nations, harming America's global economic competitiveness into the future," the companies and organizations said in a so-called friend-of-court brief. Under the Obama-era "H-4 Rule," the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2015 issued visas to spouses, more than 90% of whom are women, of more than 580,000 highly skilled workers who live in the U.S. on H-1B visas, according to the companies' filing. H-4 visas are critical to couples' decisions to come to the U.S., buy homes and raise children, they argue. The Trump administration attempted to dismantle the rule, but never introduced regulation to do so.

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