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The Trump administration is tightening access to visas that many high-tech firms rely on

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration introduced long-anticipated changes to the H-1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers on Tuesday, aimed at tightening eligibility for a program highly valued by U.S. high-tech firms and other employers.

The changes, some of which come under immediate effect and all of which will likely face legal challenges, would make it tougher for applicants to qualify for an H-1B visa and significantly more expensive for companies to sponsor them.

Here are a few things you need to know about the new policies.

In June, President Trump announced a temporary ban on H-1B and several other foreign-worker visa types for new applicants still abroad. He justified the ban, which was set to last through the end of 2020, as a necessary measure to protect American workers who lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic.

However, a federal judge in California last week temporarily lifted the ban on most companies that were suing to strike it down, and the State Department later announced it would halt all enforcement of the ban while litigation continues. The new rules apply to all H-1B applicants, here or abroad, and aim to set more permanent restrictions.

Who could be affected by the changes?

Anyone currently applying for a new H-1B visa or a renewal of an existing visa. All of those people are subject to new wage requirements imposed by the Labor Department, as well as new regulations from the Department of Homeland Security governing which degrees and occupations qualify for H-1B visas.

One major change applies to any H-1B visa worker who is employed by one company but working primarily on site at a second. Such arrangements are particularly popular among large companies that contract with outside information-technology or human-resources companies. Any employee in that situation could receive only a visa good for one year, as opposed to the more typical three years.

The change, should it take effect, would be particularly onerous for hundreds of thousands of Indian workers. Because of caps on permanent residence status for Indians, they are caught in a yearslong backlog and rely on H-1B visas to remain in the country legally in the meantime. Many of these people are employed by IT companies that place them with clients. Under the proposed rules, they would need to have their visas renewed each year, a process that would cost their employers thousands of dollars each time.

Anyone working on a valid H-1B visa wouldn’t immediately be affected. Anyone who has filed an H-1B visa petition with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration services by early December also wouldn’t be affected.

Yes. The Department of Homeland Security estimated Tuesday that about a third of applicants who put in for H-1B visas in the past five years wouldn’t have qualified for them under the proposed new set of rules.

That is the case for a variety of reasons. Among the most significant are more restrictive standards for what qualifies as a “specialty occupation”—the fields ranging from software engineers to doctors to architects that H-1B recipients are permitted to work in.

DHS will require that applicants have at least a bachelor’s degree, eliminating the possibility that some applicants enter the U.S. with years of relevant experience that could earlier have been deemed equivalent to a college education. The new rules also specify that the degree must be in a directly relevant field, meaning applicants for a job as a computer programmer likely couldn’t have a degree in economics or engineering.

Those more restrictive standards could also make it tougher for some entire job categories to qualify for H-1B visas—because if more than one degree type can qualify an applicant for a particular job, that job wouldn’t be considered sufficiently specialized to be eligible for an H-1B worker. That provision would target newer fields like artificial intelligence or market research, where specific degrees don’t exist or aren’t common.

The government has already cited some of these objections in seeking to reject H-1B visa applications, with differing amounts of success. The rejection rate for H-1B visas has risen under the Trump administration, from 6.1% in 2016 to 15.1% in 2019.

Starting immediately, applicants and their sponsoring companies must make sure they are complying with new wage requirements set by the Labor Department, which significantly raise the benchmark salaries H-1B visa recipients must be paid. An entry-level electrical engineer in San Jose, Calif., for example, would be required to receive a salary of $127,042, compared with the current requirement of $88,712, according to Labor Department data.

The new wage requirements enter force Thursday and will affect any applicant who hasn’t filed paperwork with the Labor Department before then as part of his or her application.

The other major changes stem from a rule published by DHS that isn’t set to take effect for two months. Those include the shortened visa requirement for contract workers and the tightened rules around specialty occupations.

Both sets of rules are very likely to be challenged in court by business and immigration groups. Legal experts say the process the administration used to issue them—so they take effect immediately, without first undergoing a public-comment period—makes them more vulnerable to be struck down.

The administration said the rushed process was necessary because H-1B visa workers could be filling jobs that might otherwise fall to jobless Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. However, the administration has lost numerous other cases where it rushed out a policy without first conducting a sufficient analysis on how the change would impact people already relying on the programs the government wants to alter.

DHS’s policy has an additional vulnerability. It was issued by Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, who two federal courts have ruled is serving illegally in that role. Should a judge in a theoretical H-1B case decide the same, the rule could be struck down for the sole reason that Mr. Wolf didn’t have the authority to issue it.

Should Democrat Joe Biden win the presidential election next month, he could also seek to reverse the changes, though that might entail a monthslong regulatory process. The Senate could also vote to undo the changes with a simple majority.