Feds granting nearly 2 million work permits to illegal immigrants in 2017

The government will dole out nearly 2 million work permits this year to immigrants who for the most part came to the country illegally or have some other tentative status, but who have been granted a foothold in the U.S. thanks to a loose immigration policy, according to statistics released last week.

Almost all of those permits are discretionary, meaning the government could deny them if officials choose.

Meanwhile, the country’s main technology guest-worker program has essentially become a pipeline for Indians to gain a foothold in the U.S. job market, according to the statistics, which show that people from India filed nearly 75 percent of all applications this year for H-1B worker petitions, the main high-skilled guest-worker program.

The statistics were released as part of President Trump’s commitment to more transparency in the immigration system, under the terms of his April “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, and are giving researchers new insights into how the legal immigration system affects the job market.

The most striking data set involves employment authorization documents, or EADs, which are the work permits the Homeland Security Department gives to asylum seekers, refugees, certain foreign students and others — including those who qualified for the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty for so-called Dreamers — who are in the country under something other than the traditional employment-based visa system.

More here