All tagged work authorization
More than 100,000 Indian women in the United States, many living in the Greater Houston area, stand to lose the ability to work if President Donald Trump’s administration moves forward with a plan to do away with their work authorization. The rule change, currently being considered by the Department of Homeland Security, would strip work authorization for some people living in the U.S. on an H-4 visa.
Kalyani Phadke always knew she wanted to get her Master’s degree and work for a top IT firm. In 2015, when an arranged marriage brought the 23-year-old to Houston, she came knowing her husband Nirav was ready to support her dreams.
After a 2017 edict from President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to remove the employment authorization of certain H-4 visa holders.
DHS wrote that it believes “some U.S. workers would benefit from this proposed rule by having a better chance at obtaining jobs that some of the population of the H-4 workers currently hold, as the proposed rule would no longer allow H-4 workers to enter the labor market early.”
At the end of 2013, Saisha Mehta moved to Houston to be with Kabir. The couple had spent two years in a long-distance relationship while Kabir finished his Master’s degree in Alaska and Saisha worked in India.
When Kabir got a job in Houston after graduation, the pair decided it was time to start their lives together. Saisha, then 29, left her established career behind to marry the love of her life and move to Houston to be with him.
There are several pieces of legislation introduced in Congress that directly or indirectly address the issue of the H-4 EADs and Green Card backlogs, that affect hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Many of those immigrants live and work in the Houston area.
Ever since President Donald Trump’s administration announced its intent to consider revoking the employment authorization for some spouses of highly-skilled immigrant workers, many community leaders have been vocal about their stance.
Gayatri, 37, met her husband, 34-year-old Aditya Swaminarayan in college when they were both studying to be computer science engineers.
When Gayatri graduated two years before Aditya, she started working — first at a call center for IBM and later as SAP support at KPIT Technologies in 2008.
After President Donald Trump’s administration announced it was looking to revoke work authorization granted to more than 100,000 spouses of H1-B visa-holders, letters poured in to the office of Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
When highly-skilled immigrants come to the United States for work, it is often on a visa called H-1B. Under this visa status, they are considered temporary, non-immigrant workers. Their visa is valid for up to three years and if they want to continue working in the United States, they have to apply for extensions.
Immigration law in the United States is shrouded in gray areas and navigating the paperwork and regulations can be challenging for the millions of immigrants in the U.S.
One visa, the H-1B visa, is a temporary, non-immigrant visa granted to highly-skilled people from other countries. The duration of an H-1B visa classification is typically three years but that can be extended to a maximum of six years.
The U.S. immigration system can be a complicated sphere to navigate with lots of legal jargon and terms. In order to help readers follow KPRC 2′s coverage, here is a glossary of the most-used terms in the Living in Limbo series.