Washington: More than a dozen top American technology companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, on Monday joined a lawsuit filed by the Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) latest rule that bars international students from staying in the United States unless they attend at least one in-person course.
Seeking a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, these companies, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other IT advocacy groups, asserted that the July 6 ICE directive will disrupt their recruiting plans, making it impossible to bring on board international students that businesses had planned to hire, and disturb the recruiting process on which the firms have relied on to identify and train their future employees.
The July 6 directive will make it impossible for a large number of international students to participate in the Curricular Practical Training (CPT) and Optional Practical Training (OPT) programmes. The U.S. will “nonsensically be sending…these graduates away to work for our global competitors and compete against us…instead of capitalising on the investment in their education here in the U.S.”, they said.
The CPT programme permits “alternative work/study, internship, cooperative education or other type of required internship or practicum offered by sponsoring employers through cooperative agreements with a student’s school”. On the other hand, the OPT programme allows up to one year of temporary employment that is directly related to an international student’s major area of study, which can occur either before the student graduates and/or after his studies are complete.
