Washington, March 30
A judge in the US has ruled that spouses of H-1B visa holders, a significantly large number of whom are Indians, can work in the country, in a big relief to foreign workers in the American tech sector who have been struggling to make ends meet.
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. Technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed a lawsuit filed by Save Jobs USA which had approached the court to dismiss the Obama-era regulation that gave employment authorisation cards to spouses of certain categories of H-1B visa holders.
Save Jobs USA is an organisation comprising IT workers who claim they lost their jobs to H-1B workers. Tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft had opposed the lawsuit. The US has so far issued nearly 1,00,000 work authorisations to spouses of H-1B workers.
