NEW DELHI: An US court has issued a ruling stating that the partners of the H-1B visa holder can also work in the country. This comes as a big relief to the foreigners residing in the country with their families, a large number of them working in the tech sector.
H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US-based companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that need specific expertise. Tech companies depend on it to hire thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed a lawsuit filed by Save Jobs USA which had approached the court to dismiss the old regulation that gave employment authorisation cards to the partners of a few categories of H-1B visa holders.
Save Jobs USA comprises IT workers who claim they lost their jobs to H-1B workers in tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The country had issued nearly 1,00,000 work authorisations to spouses of H-1B workers.
Judge Chutkan said that the primary contention of Save Jobs USA is that Congress has never granted the Department of Homeland Security authority to allow foreign nationals, like H-4 visa-holders, to work during their stay in the United States. But that contention runs headlong into the text of the Immigration and Nationality Act, decades of executive-branch practice and both explicit and implicit congressional ratification of that practice, she mentioned.
Ajay Bhutoria, a prominent community leader and advocate for immigrant rights, applauded the court's decision to allow H-1B partners to work and support their families. The partners of the H-1B visa holders were not allowed to work in the country until recently and that used to overburden some of the foreigners working in the countries.
According to reports, 30 to 40 per cent of these foreigners are Indian IT professionals, a significant number of whom are on H-1B and L1 visas.
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