Play all audios:
A U.S appeals court on Friday, August 2 rejected a challenge to a federal rule that lets spouses of people with H-1B visas, which go to highly educated foreign professionals, to work in the
United States. This federal immigration rule was implemented under former President Barack Obama to grant visas to workers in occupations that require special education or training. A
majority of these immigrant works belong to the U.S. tech industry. Major companies such as Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com and Microsoft filed briefs with a lower court backing the 2015 rule.
These companies had argued that allowing the spouses of visa holders to work in the United States would encourage H-1B workers to seek green cards for citizenship. Making it easier for
companies to retain highly skilled employees. The D.C. Circuit affirmed a ruling by a Washington-based federal judge dismissing a 2015 lawsuit by Save Jobs USA, which represents former
employees of utility Southern California Edison who have said they were displaced by immigrant workers. The lawsuit challenging the legality of this rule was similar to a 2022 case in which
the D.C. Circuit rejected a challenge to a regulation allowing foreign students to remain in the U.S and work after graduating. Save Jobs USA argued that the 2022 decision was wrong and did
not apply to the group’s lawsuit because it was issued before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that curbed the powers of federal
agencies. The Supreme Court decision eliminated the longstanding requirement, called “Chevron deference,” that makes courts defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of laws that they
enforce if they are ambiguous. But the D.C. Circuit on Friday ruled that while its 2022 decision cited Chevron as a “fallback argument,” the court had separately found that federal law
clearly authorized the challenged rule in that case, and said that was also true of the regulation at issue in Friday’s decision. _-Reuters_