Trump’s visa restrictions will have impact on South Florida’s multinationals, tech firms

President Donald Trump expanded his crackdown on foreign workers on Monday, freezing green cards issued outside the United States until the end of the year and adding many temporary work visas to the freeze, affecting tech companies, the tourism industry and hundreds of multinationals in South Florida, many staffed with high-paid foreign executives who live and work here.

The new policy is “extending and expanding” on Trump’s April pause on issuing new green cards, which will continue beyond the initial 60-day period until the end of the year, according to a senior administration official.

The proclamation includes new restrictions on most H-1B, H-4, H-2B, J-1 and L-1 visas, with some exceptions, lasting through Dec. 31.

“The president is expanding that measure in light of the, frankly, the expanding unemployment and the number of Americans who are out of work,” the official told reporters. “He’s extending and expanding the suspension of certain visas through the end of this calendar year 2020.”

Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said the impact will be palatable in Florida, particularly in the tech, tourism and healthcare segments.

“Trump’s immigration restrictions would stymie Florida’s COVID-19 recovery and reopening efforts,’’ she said. “Key targets expected in the restrictions include the H-1B visa, issued to computer programmers at Disney and physicians in the hospitals.”

Healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients would be exempt from the green-card freeze, although they will have a narrower exemption.

Enrique Gonzalez, a longtime business immigration lawyer and partner at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy in Coral Gables, said the greatest impact to South Florida businesses will be the suspension of H-1B and L-1 visas. H-1B visas, capped at 85,000 a year, are used widely in the tech industry; L-1 visas are used by multinational corporations.

“Basically any multinational companies that bring in employees or executives from abroad,” he said.

According to Coral Gables-based WorldCity, which tracks multinationals, there are more than 1,000 multinationals with offices in South Florida, including Apple, Amazon, HBO, Discovery, FedEx, Visa, Mastercard, Tiffany’s, L’Oreal, HSBC, Boston Scientific and Novartis, among others.

South Florida has more multinationals than any other part of the state, said WorldCity President Ken Roberts, employing thousands of people, many in high-paid jobs.

Gonzalez, the attorney, gave an example of how this could impact South Florida: “There is a large multinational, publicly traded company that just completed an acquisition of a U.S. company earlier this year that was seeking to transfer its executive team to the U.S. on L-1 visas. The proposed action would significantly delay that.”

“Another example includes a multinational company with a multimillion-dollar investment in South Dade, which has created over 100 jobs locally. They would not be able to transfer a key executive on an L-1 visa to the U.S. during a critical phase of development,” Gonzalez added.

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The senior Trump administration official said there will be few exceptions to the new rules. Some H-2B applicants working in the food supply chain, including seasonal agricultural workers, will be exempt. All working L-1 and virtually all J-1 cultural visa applications — excluding professors and scholars — will be affected by the new policy.

But the official argued that the changes were necessary because of the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, saying the new restrictions would “open up 525,000 jobs that might otherwise be taken by foreign workers — legal, but foreign workers.”

In the proclamation, Trump says that “American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States to perform temporary work.

“The overall unemployment rate in the United States nearly quadrupled between February and May of 2020 — producing some of the most extreme unemployment ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the May rate of 13.3 percent reflects a marked decline from April, millions of Americans remain out of work,” the proclamation said.

H-1B visas stipulate that the person has “highly specialized knowledge” and a minimum of a bachelor’s degree, often in science, engineering, technology, teaching or accounting.

Critics say high-tech companies have used the H-1B visas as a way to outsource jobs to foreigners.

Thomas J. Donohue, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief executive officer, told the Associated Press that Trump’s measures would harm the American economy. “Putting up a ‘not welcome’ sign for engineers, executives, IT experts, doctors, nurses and other workers won’t help our country. It will hold us back. Restrictive changes to our nation’s immigration system will push investment and economic activity abroad, slow growth and reduce job creation.”

Trump announced in April that he would freeze the distribution of green cards to most applicants, with the exception of farm workers and the immediate family members of American citizens. Those exemptions remain in place.

While characterizing the new work visa restrictions as “temporary,” the senior administration official said the president’s executive action would also include more long-term measures.

“The H-1Bs, the pause on visas, is the temporary action in the president’s action today in the executive order. The more permanent actions that he is directing us to take include reforming the H-1B system to move in the direction of a more merit-based system,” the official said. “You hear the president talk all the time about getting the best and the brightest, and you also hear him talking about protecting American jobs. So these reforms will do both.”

The official said that the secretary of labor would also use existing, yet dormant statutory authorities “to investigate abuses in the H-1B space,” including allegedly discriminatory practices.

The administration will also begin requiring biometric data and security checks for all visa holders “prior to entry.”

Currently, the official said, “it is not a uniform set of checks before people arrive.”

Monique Madan: 305-376-2108, @moniqueomadan