ro-American lawyers are pressuring federal appeals court judges to kill a covert legal claim used by government officials to sneak at least two million salary-cutting foreign workers into U.S. workplaces.
The three judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have three broad options when interpreting section 1324a of the immigration law, said John Miano, one of the lawyers who is arguing to kill the legal claim on behalf of the Immigration Reform Law Institute and a group of U.S. graduates in the Save Jobs USA coalition.
The judges could agree with business groups and agency officials to declare that section 1324a of the immigration law gives President Donald Trump unlimited authority to issue work permits, said Miano. But that approval would be “just amazingly unconstitutional” because it would provide enormous unrestricted power to Trump and future presidents, Miano said.
The judges may declare that section 1324a means only Congress has the authority to issue work permits. That would be the correct decision, Miano said, but “they are opening up a can of worms.”
The can of worms is that a Congress-only verdict would knock out the legal foundations for the decision by President George Bush to create the OPT program which steered professional jobs to 400,000 foreign graduates in 2017. It would also knock out President Barack Obama’s legal justification for giving work permits to 800,000 ‘DACA’ illegals and to 100,000 spouses of H-1B visa workers.
More importantly, a Congress-only interpretation of 1324a would sharply reduce the number of foreign graduates who would volunteer to stay for years in low-wage H-1B jobs throughout the white-collar sector.
If the various 1324a outsourcing programs are revoked, perhaps 400,000 foreign graduates would be required to go home. The resulting correction of the white-collar labor market would force high-tech investors to raise salary offers to young Americans, including the 800,000 Americans who will earn 2019 degrees in business, design, software, engineering, healthcare, architecture, science, and math.
Goldman Sachs says Trump’s tight labor-market policy (AKA ‘Hire American’) gave 4% raise to blue-collar/middle-class in 2018. But upper-income graduate salaries lagged – maybe b/c of 1.5 million visa-worker graduates who work for spaghettiOs & green cards https://t.co/g6jtv9BS81
Miano wants to raise white-collar salaries because he represents a group of Americans who argue that their salaries and career opportunities are being throttled by Obama’s 2015 “H4EAD” giveaway.
Obama’s agency claims that section 1324a allowed him to award “Employment Authorization Documents” work permits to the 100,000 spouses of H-1B temporary workers. The H-1B spouses arrive on H4 visas, so Obama’s work-permit program is called H4EAD.
This high-stakes legal and political drama was created in the early 2000s when federal judges did not quickly squash or approve the various Bush and Obama work-permit giveaways based on the 1324a claim, said Miano. But it continues because a string of federal judges who are hearing two lawsuits have passed the decision to each other, so dragging the litigation out for 11 years, he said.
The third option for the federal appeals court is to continue the delays and dodge the political conflict by sending the case back down to a lower judge, said Miano.
But that dodge would be pointless, said Miano because the lower court judge has already announced she will decide against Miano’s case. If the decision goes back to her, Miano said he will promptly appeal her denial verdict back up to the appeals court.
Top-level officials at the DHS have been dodging the 1324a issue for years, Miano said.
Under Bush, Obama, and Trump, DHS officials decided to neither defend nor denounce the work-permit claim. DHS “has been taking a dive in the case because the deep state wants to preserve this ability to do unlimited work permits … and [President Donald] Trump did not clean out the deep state [in DHS],” Miano said.
For example, the Department of Justice declined in 2017 to litigate Obama’s 1324a claim that he could award work permits to 800,000 DACA migrants in 2012. “The government does not raise these arguments, however, so the Court will not consider them,” a D.C. district court said in 2018.
by Neil Munro