Most people assume the 60-day grace period has been around forever. It hasn't. DHS finalized the rule in the last months of the Obama administration, and it only kicked in come January 2017. Before that, if your job tied to an H-1B ended, you were basically out of status right then. No cushion, no buffer, nothing.
DHS now wants to go back to that.
Here's how it currently works. Employment ends, whether that's a layoff, a firing, or the company just folding, and the worker gets up to 60 days to find someone new to sponsor them, switch to a different visa category, or pack up and leave on their own schedule. Technically it's discretionary. USCIS can shorten it or deny it outright. Lawyers who work this stuff say that almost never actually happens in practice.
The proposal has a title that doesn't leave much to guess about. "Eliminating the Discretionary 60-day Grace Period." It got through White House review on August 27, marked "consistent with change," and now it's sitting there waiting on Federal Register publication. After that comes a public comment period, typically 30 to 60 days. Then, maybe, a final rule. So nothing's actually happened yet. Nobody's losing their grace period this week. But the intent is out there in writing now.
It's also bigger than just H-1B. Seven other categories get swept into this too. L-1, O-1, TN, the E-1/E-2/E-3 group, plus everyone's dependents riding on those visas.
DHS's own explanation, straight from the proposal text, talks about "restoring the expectation that aliens depart the United States upon cessation of the employment... upon which the alien's status was based." There's a bureaucratic angle mixed in there too, something about how figuring out grace-period eligibility case by case wastes time for everyone involved.
Then there's the labor argument. DHS thinks companies will just hire American workers for those newly empty roles instead of scrambling to bring in someone new on a visa. Immigration attorneys aren't convinced.
Hiring in tech, healthcare, engineering, wherever, usually takes weeks even under normal conditions.
Multiple interview rounds. Paperwork that has to go through Labor Department review.
Somebody who gets laid off on a Tuesday isn't finding a new sponsor and getting filings submitted by Thursday. That's not how any of this works, and everyone who's dealt with the process knows it.
About 70 percent of approved H-1B petitions last fiscal year went to Indian nationals. The exact figure moves a bit depending on which dataset you're reading, 71 percent in some counts, 69.9 in others, but the gap between India and every other country isn't close either way. Tech, engineering, healthcare, that's where most of these workers are.
Ajay Jain Bhutoria used to advise the Biden White House on Asian American and Pacific Islander issues.
He called this move "inhumane and unworkable," and honestly, he's been saying the opposite thing needs to happen for years now. Back in 2023 he was pushing to extend the grace period to 180 days, not cut it entirely.
His reasoning hasn't shifted. Corporate hiring, once you add visa sponsorship into the mix, just doesn't move at 60-day speed. Going to zero makes even less sense to him.
This isn't some standalone policy tweak that showed up out of nowhere. About a year back, Trump signed executive orders creating the Gold Card program, residency for a million-dollar investment, plus a $100,000 fee tacked onto new H-1B petitions.
A federal judge in Boston struck that fee down, calling it an unauthorized tax, and the administration's appealing while the underlying order is set to expire around September 20.
Around the same stretch, immigrant visa interviews got paused at US missions worldwide for some new training rollout.
A handful of states, Texas and Florida in particular, already moved to restrict H-1B sponsorship through their public universities earlier this year.
None of this is happening in a vacuum, in other words.
The grace period is still there right now, today, as this gets published. What happens to it comes down to what happens after the Federal Register listing goes live, and how many people bother to file comments once the clock starts.
DHS has proposed eliminating the discretionary 60-day grace period that lets H-1B and other visa holders stay in the US to look for new employment after a job loss. The rule dates to 2017; before then, workers generally lost status the moment their job ended.
The proposal cleared White House review on August 27 but still needs Federal Register publication and a public comment period before any final rule takes effect, so nothing has changed yet.
It would affect eight visa categories total, including L-1, O-1, TN, and E-visa holders. Indian nationals, roughly 70 percent of approved H-1B recipients last fiscal year, would be hit hardest.
Former Biden advisor Ajay Jain Bhutoria has criticized the move and called for extending the grace period rather than cutting it.
The proposal follows other recent immigration restrictions, including a contested $100,000 H-1B fee and a pause on immigrant visa interviews abroad.
