Trump administration weighs suspending program for foreign students in further legal immigration restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
Representatives of the White House and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Critics of the proposals say Miller and other immigration hawks are using the pandemic to accomplish a goal they have had since Trump took office: bringing down the overall number of legal immigrants. When Miller served on the staff of then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., he helped draft a bill that would have eliminated OPT. Now, four Republican senators have asked the White House to take the issue of curbing OPT and other legal migration programs into their own hands."We urge you to continue to suspend new nonimmigrant guest workers for one year or until our new national unemployment figures return to normal levels whichever comes first," Cotton and Sens.
Todd Schulte, president of FWD.US, a pro-immigration reform group of business and tech leaders that counts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg among its founders, said the plan is too similar to previous proposals to be framed as a legitimate response to the economic crisis caused by COVID-19. "Three years ago, when unemployment was at 4 percent, the signatories who were in the Senate at the time tried to slash legal immigration by more than 50 percent. ... Today, as unemployment has skyrocketed, these senators now say we need to slash legal immigration in response to the COVID-19 crisis," Schulte said.
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