Trump tightens restrictions for work visas

What happened

The Trump administration Thursday dramatically shortened the length of work permits for asylum seekers, refugees and other immigrants seeking humanitarian protections. New permits will be valid for 18 months, from five years previously.

The State Department separately ramped up its vetting for H-1B work visas, blocking applicants if they or their family members “have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking” and other forms of “censorship,” Reuters reported.

Who said what

The Department of Homeland Security said “forcing immigrants to renew their work permits more often” will give the government “more opportunities to re-vet them,” The Wall Street Journal said. But the “hundreds of thousands of people” likely affected by the change are the backbone of “meatpacking companies,” construction, and senior care, among other industries.

H-1B visas, reserved for highly skilled workers, are “crucial for U.S. tech companies which recruit heavily from countries including India and China,” Reuters said. The instruction to search LinkedIn and résumés to weed out any applicant “responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression” was conveyed in a Dec. 2 cable to all U.S. missions.

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What next?

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on “allegedly leaked documents,” but said President Donald Trump “himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts” and “he does not want other Americans to suffer this way.” The visa moves “align with” Trump’s “threats of a slew of aggressive actions to curtail legal migration” after a National Guard member was killed outside the White House last month, Bloomberg said.