Federal authorities will examine social media activity by all foreign citizens applying for the H-1B skilled-worker visa and the related H-4 spousal visa, and applicants must start keeping their social media accounts public, federal authorities announced this week.
The U.S. Department of State’s move to start conducting the “online presence reviews,” and bar applicants from keeping their social media accounts set to “private,” echoes a policy imposed earlier for student visas. Accounts of H-1B and H-4 applicants must be set to “public” by Dec. 15, the State Department said.
“The State Department uses all available information in visa screening and vetting to identify visa applicants who are inadmissible to the United States, including those who pose a threat to U.S. national security or public safety,” the department said in the announcement Wednesday.
Reuters on Friday reported that an internal State Department memo said H-1B applicants involved in “censorship” of free speech should be considered for rejection. The memo, sent Dec. 2 to all U.S. consular missions, ordered consular officers to check resumes and LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants and family members who would travel with them, to see if they have worked in areas including fact-checking, misinformation, and content moderation, according to Reuters.
The announcement came after a man from Afghanistan — a former fighter in his home country for a CIA-trained paramilitary unit, who was granted asylum in the U.S. — shot two National Guard service members in Washington D.C., killing one and triggering an administration crackdown on allowing foreign citizens into the U.S.
The visa, intended for skilled foreign workers and heavily relied upon by major Silicon Valley technology firms, has generated controversy over its widespread use by staffing companies that supply labor to tech companies, often at wages found to be below prevailing pay levels. Claims of H-1B workers replacing Americans have further fueled the debate, which in President Donald Trump’s second term exploded into a rancorous dispute that has fractured his Make America Great Again movement, setting tech insiders close to the President against anti-immigration hardliners.
Large-scale layoffs at Silicon Valley firms that continue hiring H-1B workers has drawn bipartisan fire.
In June, the State Department announced it would subject student visa applicants to “a comprehensive and thorough vetting, including online presence,” and said applicants must make their social media accounts public. Consular officers were told to look for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.”
The department’s announcement mentioned only applicants, and officials did not immediately answer questions from this news organization Friday concerning whether current H-1B holders, or their spouses on the H-4, would be screened for social media expressions of purported anti-U.S. hostility.
“I think the goal of this is to give (federal authorities) more tools to deny anyone they want to deny,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, which supports the H-1B.
“The message here is that anyone who plans to apply for a visa to the United States should be extremely careful what they post, re-post or even like on their social media. Anything can be used against them.”
Anderson, a former counselor to the commissioner at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service — a federal department replaced by other agencies when the Homeland Security department was created — believes the vetting of visa applicants can be traced back to attempts by the Trump administration to deport pro-Palestinian activists earlier this year.
“What they found was that once someone is in the United States, previous Supreme Court rulings have shown that people start to have quite a few rights, including First Amendment rights,” Anderson said. “Because of that, they decided to shift a lot of these policies to preventing people from coming in the first place.”
Silicon Valley’s technology giants are consistently in the top 10 direct recipients of the visa. This year, Meta received 6,294 direct H-1B approvals, Google received 5,552, and Apple, 5,382, federal government data show.
Trump’s position on the H-1B has swung widely. In 2016, he assailed the visa as a “cheap labor program,” and in his first term his administration dramatically boosted H-1B application-denial rates, and unsuccessfully attempted to raise minimum pay rates. But he began to publicly defend the visa late last year, and repeated his support as recently as last month. Meanwhile, major Silicon Valley tech companies and their leaders have donated millions of dollars to Trump’s January inauguration and his new White House ballroom.
In September, Trump used a presidential proclamation to impose a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for foreign workers not already in the U.S, a financial barrier that critics charged would give deep-pocketed tech giants an advantage over startups.
In October, the Trump administration stripped holders of the H-4 spousal visa — thousands of whom are estimated to live and work in the Bay Area — of the ability to receive automatic extensions for their work permits when their renewal applications have been submitted but not fully processed by immigration authorities. The change, immigration experts said, put H-4 holders at risk of losing their right to employment if processing times grow longer.