On October 23, 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register to “modernize the H-1B specialty occupation worker program.” There is a sixty-day notice and comment period for the proposed rule, and the public is invited to submit comments on the Federal Register website.

The proposed rule sets out to impose changes to the H-1B program, as well as to codify a number of existing rules. We must point out that the proposed rule is quite lengthy; therefore, our summary does not cover all of the proposed changes. We will outline a few of the most notable proposed changes below which we feel may be of most interest to our community.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) program celebrated a decade of existence earlier this year. DACA went into effect as an executive order signed by President Obama to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors without “the formal agency rulemaking process, which requires public notice and comment”. It was intended as a “stopgap measure to protect some of the nation’s most vulnerable immigrants”, from deportation and allow beneficiaries to obtain work authorization and reside legally in the US. DACA was never meant to be a permanent solution but a means to be used for a limited time until Congress passed new immigration legislation addressing the immigration status of certain undocumented minors.