The U.S. technology industry spent the weekend pushing back against President Trump’s executive order banning citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
Tech companies may have a tougher fight coming, with high stakes for thousands of Puget Sound-area workers: reform of guest-worker visa programs that the likes of Microsoft, Amazon.com, Google and a host of Indian outsourcing firms rely on.
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Those programs may be Trump’s next target as he inserts a more nationalistic bent to the country’s immigration laws. A draft executive order, obtained by Bloomberg News, would direct immigration authorities to give priority to ensuring jobs are held by Americans.
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Our country’s immigration policies should be designed and implemented to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest, the draft proposal reads, according to a copy reviewed by Bloomberg.
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Large technology companies have broadly stood up for immigration in the past few days but have been reluctant to stake out policy positions ahead of potential guest-worker proposals from the new administration. But they’d likely oppose an order that rolled back current programs.
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We would come out against it, and advocate every branch of government on the stupidity of the action, said Michael Schutzler, chief of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) lobbying group. We would hope the state would pursue that with the same kind of legal fervor.
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It is unclear what force an executive order would carry. Guest-worker programs are governed by acts of Congress and federal rule-making procedures, and the legislative branch would likely have to step in to accomplish major changes, immigration lawyers say.
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The order targets the alphabet soup of programs, H-1B, L-1, E-2 and B1 among them, that determine who among the hundreds of thousands applicants annually receive clearance to live and work in the U.S.
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The most popular of those programs, H-1B, is used predominantly by software makers and…