At a White House press conference on 8 October, Vice President Vance singled out Microsoft, saying the company had engaged in “fraudulent behaviour”. Within hours came news that unsettled many foreign workers in the United States: Microsoft, together with Adobe, Cognizant and Infosys, was suspended from the permanent labour certification (PERM) programme. PERM is the first step for H-1B employees applying for employer-sponsored permanent residence, and the Labour Secretary said both new and pending applications involving the companies would no longer be accepted.
The same day, nine elite universities were named
Mr Vance also produced a list of nine institutions: MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech and Arizona State University. All face investigation over alleged J-1 visa fraud, and the Labour Department inspector-general said subpoenas had been served. J-1 status covers students and scholars entering the US for exchange and visiting programmes.
The squeeze has been building all year
Consider the sequence. On 24 August, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a fee of around $103,000 on H-1B petitions, after an earlier attempt at $100,000 was blocked by the courts. On 7 October, it proposed that universities pay $70,000 for each international student’s first application for optional practical training (OPT), plus $30,000 for an extension. And on 15 September, the rule ending duration-of-status (D/S) for F and J visitors took effect: admission is now granted for a fixed period of up to four years, after which an extension or re-entry is required.
The tighter the policy, the cleaner the file
A dependable rule of visa work is that when pathways narrow, every document is read more closely. Degree certificates, diplomas, transcripts, enrolment and employment letters, income and financial evidence, together with the birth certificates and marriage certificates needed for dependants, are mostly Chinese originals and require accurate, complete and properly formatted English translations. Inconsistent name spellings, omitted course titles or a copied date or number can mean requests for further evidence and missed deadlines — or, worse, doubts about the authenticity of the file.
These documents cannot be handled with raw machine output, nor translated body-only while stamp pages and footnotes are dropped; those details are exactly what officers examine. How we handle the work is set out in “How Visa Documents Should Be Translated: a Document Checklist for Students and Workers”, while “Certified Documents Allow Zero Error: Five Skills for Visa and Immigration Translation” is written for translators. If you have materials to submit soon, our certified translation page sets out the service.