Before the ink is dry on his chaotic plan to charge employers a fat fee for hiring foreigners, U.S. President Donald Trump may end up choking off the very pipeline through which young overseas students trickle into the American job market: College education.
The recent and hastily imposed Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers opened a new front in Washington¡¯s increasingly ugly trade spat with New Delhi. Indian techies and doctors, who hold more than 70% of the existing visas under this category, read the move as an eviction notice from their careers and lives in the U.S. Or at least that¡¯s how Trump¡¯s proclamation was received, until the White House clarified that a one-time $100,000 fee on H-1B visas would only apply to employers of new applicants ¡ª and doctors may be exempt.
And that was just the other week. A separate proposal, announced soon after, seeks to overhaul the H-1B lottery itself by introducing a wage-based rule into what is currently a random process. The rejig goes way beyond targeting India, or for that matter, the $100,000 fee. Once implemented, it would dim the appeal of the F-1 student visa ¡ª a far more crucial source of America¡¯s long-term competitiveness than the 85,000-a-year jobs quota. Although damaging the U.S. university system isn¡¯t the intended goal, that would be the unfortunate result.
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