The first two weeks of the Biden Administration have seen a flurry of activity indicating it will move away from the more restrictive immigration environment of the Trump era, including.
and withdrawing all pending rules that had not yet been published in the
Federal Register. Under the Trump administration’s continued “Buy American and Hire American” policy, these late-enacted regulations were largely focused on continuing to restrict high-skilled worker visas by changing the H-1B lottery selection process, realigning the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) prevailing wage requirements to higher salary percentiles for H-1B visa holders, and placing additional obligations on both employers that place visa workers at third-party client sites and on the end-client companies where those workers are placed.
Business Immigration Impact
Below is a summary of what high-skilled business immigration employers can expect from the first six months of the new Biden administration.
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Given the tumultuous news that occupied all of our attentions last week, you may have missed the announcement that President-elect Biden has nominated Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to be the next Secretary of Labor – the first union member to fill this role in nearly 50 years. The January 7 announcement is significant for the employment community given that the head of the Labor Department wields tremendous influence over workplace policy. Naturally, most employers are curious about what this transition will mean for them. To answer that question, we’ve once again assembled the opinions of some of our firm’s foremost thought leaders to help provide a glimpse into what you should expect from the U.S. Department of Labor for the foreseeable future. The consensus opinion? Get ready for a pendulum swing back toward worker-centered policy that employers last experienced during the eight-year Obama administration.
On October 6, 2020, the Department of Labor (DOL) issued a new rule entitled “
th, the DOL is changing its computation of wage levels under the Department’s four-tiered wage structure based on the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) wage survey administered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This new rule significantly increases the prevailing wages which are required to be paid to all H-1B, H-1B1 and E-3 workers. The rule also changes the prevailing wage levels 1-4 from the 17th, 34th, 50th and 67th percentiles to 45th, 62nd, 78th and 95th percentile of surveyed wages.
According to the DOL, the primary purpose of these changes is “to update the computation of prevailing wage levels under the existing four-tier wage structure to better reflect the actual wages earned by U.S. workers similarly employed to foreign workers. This update will allow DOL to more effectively ensure that the employment of immigrant and nonimmigrant workers admitted or otherwise provided st
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As a result of recent federal litigation, the COVID-19 pandemic,
and the Trump Administration s efforts to protect U.S.
workers and wages, there have been several U.S. immigration
developments. This writing will provide an update of some of these
recent U.S. immigration developments and the potential impact on
U.S. employers and foreign nationals.
U.S. District Court Issues Decision to Set Aside the
U.S. Department of Labor s and U.S. Department of Homeland
Security s H-1B/PERM rules: The U.S.