US court upholds rule granting work permits to visa holders' spouses

By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday rejected a challenge to a federal rule implemented under former President Barack Obama that lets spouses of people with H-1B visas, which go to highly educated foreign professionals, to work in the United States, saying a recent Supreme Court ruling curtailing the powers of federal agencies had no impact on the case.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that federal immigration law gives the U.S. Department of Homeland Security broad powers to regulate the conditions of admission into the United States for visa holders.

H-1B visas, granted to workers in occupations that require special education or training, are widely used in the U.S. tech industry. Major business groups and tech companies including Alphabet's Google, Amazon.com and Microsoft had filed briefs with a lower court backing the 2015 rule.

Echoing DHS, the companies had argued that allowing the spouses of visa holders to work in the United States would encourage H-1B workers to seek green cards allowing them to stay permanently, in turn making it easier for companies to retain highly skilled employees.

The D.C. Circuit affirmed a ruling by a Washington-based federal judge dismissing a 2015 lawsuit by Save Jobs USA, which represents former employees of utility Southern California Edison who have said they were displaced by immigrant workers.

The lawsuit challenging the legality of the rule was comparable to a 2022 case in which the D.C. Circuit rejected a challenge to a separate regulation allowing foreign students to remain in the United States and work after graduating, according to Friday's ruling.

Save Jobs USA had argued that the 2022 decision was wrong and that it did not apply to the group's lawsuit because it was issued before the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling in a case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that curbed the powers of federal agencies.

The Supreme Court decision eliminated the longstanding requirement, called "Chevron deference," that courts defer to federal agencies' reasonable interpretations of laws that they enforce if they are ambiguous.

But the D.C. Circuit on Friday ruled that while its 2022 decision cited Chevron as a "fallback argument," the court had separately found that federal law clearly authorized the challenged rule in that case, and said that was also true of the regulation at issue in Friday's decision.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Will Dunham)