Right to work? In Silicon Valley, visa fight as symbol of blocked American dream.
Anu Mahendran didn’t quite have a panic attack when she learned that the Trump administration might revoke work permits for spouses of foreign workers.
But she came close.
“I was shivering,” she says. “I went through phases where you’re just sitting there, nervous, not knowing what to do and what’s going to happen.”
Ms. Mahendran, who immigrated to the US from India in 2007, is a senior manager at NetApp, a Sunnyvale, Calif., data services provider. Her legal ability to work – and thus help her husband provide for their 11-month-old son and pay their mortgage – rests on an Obama-era program that grants employment authorization documents, or EADs, to spouses of skilled workers here on H-1B visas.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services has been considering revoking the program as part of President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, signed in the fall. The agency reiterated its intent in a letter released this week from USCIS director Lee Francis Cissna to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley.
'I should be able to find work''What wrong did we do?'
