Why US President Donald Trump’s H-1B visa freeze will hurt India most

Illegal immigration has long been the subject of fervid debate in the US.

Now President Donald Trump is making “legal immigration a scapegoat” with an eye on the upcoming election, says Poorvi Chotani, a managing partner at Law Quest, an immigration law firm with offices in the US and India.

“How can the US recover more than 17 million lost jobs due to the pandemic by keeping out a little more than half a million foreign workers for the rest of the year?” she told me.

Ms Chotani is mainly alluding to the H-1B visa programme that currently admits 85,000 immigrants each year, many for skilled jobs in the tech industry. On Tuesday, Mr Trump suspended this and other work visas that allowed foreigners to work in the US until the end of 2020.