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Google is leading a cohort of tech companies campaigning to protect the spouses and dependents of H-1B visa workers.

The Alphabet company filed an amicus brief on Friday in Save Jobs USA v. Department of Homeland Security. That pending court case threatens to undo a 2015 program that allows some residents on H-4 visas — those dependent on H-1B visa holders, such as spouses — to seek work authorization in the United States.

The brief was cosigned by several other tech companies including Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, and Microsoft.

The H-4 employment authorization program was launched in 2015. Save Jobs USA, an advocacy group of IT workers, filed a lawsuit soon after, claiming the program would increase competition in the labor market for its members.

A district court first ruled against Save Jobs, but the DC Circuit reversed that judgment in 2019 and has sent it back down to the district court.

Google and the other cosigning companies argue that repealing the program would not only harm H-4 holders but have a knock-on effect on H-1B workers, according to a draft of the amicus brief seen by Insider.

The cohort of tech companies hire tens of thousands overseas workers on the H-1B visa each year. as well as H-4 visa holders. Google declined to specify exactly how many it hired last year.

"The loss of employment authorization would result in lost income, leaving some families unable to pay their bills — a result that is already occurring at an alarming rate due to government delays in processing employment authorization paperwork," it reads.

More than 90,000 H-4 visa holders have been granted work authorization in the US to date, according to USCIS data, the majority of them are women.

"The pandemic has already disproportionately impacted women and ending this program would only make things worse, leading to disrupted careers and lost wages," wrote Catherine Lacavera, Google's VP of litigation, in a blog post published Friday.

"Furthermore, if the program is lost, the practical effect is that we welcome a person to the U.S. to work but we make it harder for their spouse to work. That hurts their family, impacts our ability to compete for talent, and harms our economy."

Since the US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced in 2015 that H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B workers could apply for work authorization, the program has been caught in a battle. The Trump administration proposed to rescind the program in 2019, but that decision was withdrawn by the Biden administration in January.

Google recently signed another brief led by the American Immigration Lawyers Association to speed up the processing time of of H-4 work authorizations.

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