Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Updated: EAD for H4 Visa Holders - Part 1

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




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