If you were an employer would you have to think twice in this situation?
You need someone to work with a very small team on a project that will take at least one year to complete.
There is a really able, willing candidate for the job — but there is a problem. Three months from now she will (pick any one of the following) be:
- Entering graduate school, or
- Leaving for two years in Antarctica, or
- Joining a nunnery.
In any of these circumstances, you would simply sigh and reject the candidate and look for someone else.
But what if the problem was that after three months the excellent candidate's work permit, say an F-1 OPT visa for recent alien college graduates, would run out; could you similarly say "no"?
I mean there is an alien involved, and maybe you would be guilty of some kind of discrimination? What to do?
An immigration lawyer must have regarded this question as serious enough to take it to the Office of Special Counsel, an arm of the U.S. Justice Department. OSC, then, equally seriously, took the matter under consideration and has issued a technical assistance letter, just one step below a decision, which said, essentially, yes, it would be OK not to hire that particular alien. OSC's text, in more lawyerly terms, said that such an action would be:
[U]nlikely to implicate the anti-discrimination provision's prohibition against citizenship status discrimination.
Well, that's a relief!
Immigration Daily reported on this matter earlier this year.