Spouses of H-1B visa holders can work in U.S., says judge

In a big relief for foreign workers in the U.S. tech sector, a judge has ruled that spouses of H-1B visa holders can work in the United States.

In a big relief for foreign workers in the U.S. tech sector, a judge has ruled that spouses of H-1B visa holders can work in the United States.

In the process, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed a lawsuit filed by Save Jobs USA which had approached the court to dismiss the Obama-era regulation that gave employment authorization cards to spouses of certain categories of H-1B visa holders.

Tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft had opposed the lawsuit. The U.S. has so far issued nearly 1,00,000 work authorizations to spouses of H-1B workers, a significantly large number of whom are Indians.

In her order, Judge Chutkan said the primary contention of Save Jobs USA is that Congress has never granted the Department of Homeland Security authority to allow foreign nationals, like H-4 visa-holders, to work during their stay in the United States.

But that contention runs headlong into the text of the Immigration and Nationality Act, decades of executive-branch practice and both explicit and implicit congressional ratification of that practice, she wrote.

The judge wrote that Congress has expressly and knowingly empowered the U.S. Government to authorize employment as a permissible condition of an H-4 spouse's stay in the United States.

The fact that the federal government has had longstanding and open responsibility for authorizing employment for similar visa classes further manifests Congress' approval of it exercising that authority, she said.