I'm wondering if the Trump families potential investments in India impacted this...
It looks like approvals for Trump Organization projects are flying through.
Applications for the United States' H-1B visas open tomorrow, as usual. Which isn't what many expected after president Donald Trump made reform of skilled workers visas one of his key campaign promises. H-1B visas allow those with a bachelor’s or higher degree in a specialty field, and an employer willing to take them on, to …
If you appoint business tycoons to your administration and look for advice from billionaires like Peter Thiel, of course you're going to be told that importing cheap labor is good because it is good for their business interests to keep wages down.
...but that doesn't mean Trump's lackeys will *approve* any of them.
There might be teeth gnashing & whinging from all the different corporations, but it's hard to claim discrimination of any particular applicant if he blanket refuses to approve *any* applicant.
No need for an Executive Order, no need to rewrite the law, just a blanket permanent choke hold on the approval process so *nobody* gets in.
If nobody gets approved then the corporations will have to go back to hiring locals, something Trump will almost assuredly crow about as a "victory" on his record.
Blargh. He makes me sick.
A new administration only has about 4000 political appointee roles in the executive branch, versus 2-3 million employees. And Trump has filled only a couple percentage of those slots.
It will be career bureaucrats making those decisions, unless a Trump appointee over them has given instructions to not approve any. But in that case you'd think someone would have heard about it, unless he wants to make a surprise tweet later this week.
H-2B visas get your folks from Colombia ad Peru and Romania and Estonia into the USA to be busboys and chambermaids and waiters and cooks. Now...who has many hotels that employ folks on H-2B visas? Who employs them over Americans because he can pay them less, and who has been called on this for saying he will create jobs for Americans while not doing so n his own hotels? Who never brought this up in his campaign?
Just sayin'
It would have been great news for IBM.
With a ban on H1B they can bring in unlimited overseas workers from IBM India to work in IBM USA on L1 visas. With the advantage that they don't have to meet US wage or working conditions.
According to the Washington Post, two of Trump's 282 campaign promises concern H-1b visas:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/i-will-give-you-everything-here-are-282-of-donald-trumps-campaign-promises/2016/11/24/01160678-b0f9-11e6-8616-52b15787add0_story.html?utm_term=.5bba5ca77c4c
#87: **expand** the number of H-1b visas.
#88: get rid of the H-1b visa program.
I'm guessing that neither of these promises will be kept.