Two Million Foreigners To Get Work Permits in 2017

The number of foreign workers getting work permits for U.S. jobs will hit 2 million this year, partly because President Donald Trump’s deputies have reduced only a few of President Barack Obama’s foreign-worker programs and policies.

Roughly 2 million foreigners will get temporary work permits, dubbed “Employment Authorization Documents,” or EADS, during 2017, despite administration efforts to cut back some of the many business-backed foreign-worker programs, according to two sets of data released by the Department of Homeland Security.

“This is almost entirely outside of our legal immigration and legal guest-worker system — these are additional workers,” said Jessica Vaughan, a policy expert at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The majority of these [EAD] work permits are given to people who originally entered the country illegally and now have some kind of exception being made for them, either on a temporary base or while they apply for some other benefit,” she added...