Trump Changes H-1B Visa Rules to Favor ‘Fashion Models’

Image: marcn via Flickr

The most bizarre sentence you will ever read on a federal government website currently sits on the US Department of Labor’s page for the H-1B visa program, a visa that is most commonly used for medical doctors and computer engineers. But under the Trump administration, the rules have been rewritten to say that “The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability.”

“Fashion models of distinguished merit and ability.” That is a turn of phrase that the federal government could only publish when Donald Trump and his dysfunctional family circus of dingbats and crass inheritees are in power.  

That bafflingly stupid sentence is not a recent addition to the policy, nor something that that Trump threw in there on his way out. According to the Wayback Machine at archive.org, that text first appeared last year on December 18, 2019.

Hey, nothing against models. I look at porn all the time. But to even invent the phrase “fashion models of distinguished merit and ability” — let alone give fashion models more prominent consideration than medical doctors and computer engineers — just emphasizes how much we cannot wait for this grotesque Trump nightmare to be over.