Purpose of the Initiatives:
As an incentive to retain
skilled foreign professionals that the country needed to sustain
the economic edge in the international competition, the USCIS
planned an administrative fix to authorize the employment for
the spouses of H-1B professionals. This plan is supposed to give
benefits to the H-1B families as well as the country. From the
perspectives of H-1B temporary foreign workers, this issue involves
a number of issues for the family as well as the spouses. Typical
H-1B foreign professionals are mostly in the twenties and some
in thirties in ages. Most importantly, most of their spouses
are college graduates who have their own professional careers.
The forced full-time house wife statuses have created a serious
problems, including the boredom of the forced unemployed spouses,
not to mention a forced compromise of their own careers for not
being able to continue their careers through employment. Unemployment
leads them to face failure in updating their skills and knowledge
and in the long run, they will have to lose their opportunity
to continue their careers. This adds the mental and emotional
stress for the professional spouses, not to mention a forced
isolation in a foreign land without close relatives, friends,
and neighbors. In the worst cases, this has been creating a marital
problem. Because of such problems, some of the H-1B high-tech
professional foreign workers had to return to their home countries
to salvage their families as well as the spouse's careers.
The
issue is commonly misunderstood as family income issues. The
real issues involve much more serious ones for the family and
professional careers of the spouses. Implementation of employment
authorization policy will help resolve these issues for the H-1B
professionals and the H-4 spouses. As for the benefit to the
country, obviously as the USCIS appropriately recognized in the
plan, H-4 employment will help to retain the needed highly skilled
foreign workers in this country. Since the spouses are mostly
young and professional in their own rights, their employment
authorization will be able to contribute to this country in many
different ways which do not need elaboration here.
In other business
and skilled foreign worker non-immigrant visa legislation such
as L-1 multinational corporate executives, managers, and specialized
knowledge workers, J-1 foreign exchange visitors, etc, the law
has accommodate this issue to relieve the primary foreign workers
from such family issues and spouses' career issues. Somehow,
however, the law has failed to extend the identical consideration
in the case of H-1B highly skilled foreign workers visa for unknown
reasons.
Continue To Part 2: http://topimmigrationnews.blogspot.com/2013/01/updated-ead-for-h4-visa-holders-part-2.html