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This Year's H-1B Visa Applications Look A Lot Like Last Year's (newsweek.com)
"This year's round of H-1B visa program applications was scheduled to launch Monday, and it was largely absent of President Donald Trump's proposed policy changes," writes Newsweek. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last updated its online page dedicated to the program, which granted visas to skilled foreign workers, Wednesday with the rules mostly similar to those of last year and quotas remaining the same. These requirements were set to launch despite Trump's vow to reform the program on the grounds that companies exploited it to fill jobs once held by U.S. citizens who earned higher wages.
An alleged draft of an executive order was leaked last month and widely circulated, raising fears that the administration was preparing to gut the program. These measures were never announced. "There was a window in which the White House could have made serious reforms," Russ Harrison, head of government relations for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA, told The Wall Street Journal. "For whatever reason, they decided not to take it."
An alleged draft of an executive order was leaked last month and widely circulated, raising fears that the administration was preparing to gut the program. These measures were never announced. "There was a window in which the White House could have made serious reforms," Russ Harrison, head of government relations for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA, told The Wall Street Journal. "For whatever reason, they decided not to take it."
The story is framed as bad but isn't it better that they take some time to craft a reasonable update to the policy? Trump has been president just a bit over two months now!
You speak as if he's actually been busy on this for the past few months. While an early draft EO in January mentioned H1-B reform, since then Trump's ADHD has brought all progress to a halt.
There is huge support in Congress for cracking down on H1-B abuse- this is one of those rare issues where which both parties agree. But actually getting something accomplished takes time away from tweeting, golfing, and monitoring Fox and Friends for intelligence updates. In desperation Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) went on twitter himself two weeks ago and begged for Trump to call his office about H1-B reform. One tweet read "I've been waiting for six yrs for a president interested in fixing H1B and that person has finally arrived/DRAIN SWAMP". Six down, four to go!