Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced new rules for high-skilled immigrants Tuesday, including a provision allowing their spouses to work.

The new measures are aimed at making it easier to keep high-skilled workers who are skilled in science, engineering and technology in the county, Reuters reports.

"These individuals are American families in waiting," Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said. "Many tire of waiting for green cards and leave the country to work for our competition. The fact is we have to do more to retain and attract world-class talent to the United States and these regulations put us on a path to do that."

One of the measures would allow the spouses of immigrants who have H-1B visas, which are given to workers in fields like technology, science and engineering, to have jobs in the United States while their spouses' green card applications are being reviewed. As the law currently stands, spouses of immigrants who hold visas are not allowed to work.

Mayorkas announced the new proposals along with Pritzker, who said the new regulations could affect up to 97,000 people in the first year and 30,000 each following year.

The other proposed regulations would give employers more ways to show that immigrant professors and researchers are the best in their respective fields.

Pritzker said that 28 percent of new businesses in the United States are started by immigrants. She added that 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or the children of immigrants, such as Google, which is co-founded by Soviet immigrant Sergey Brin and Yahoo, which was co-founded by Taiwanese immigrant Jerry Yang.

She also said that she supports President Obama's immigration reform agenda, because it would allow the United States "to staple a green card to the degrees of graduate students instead of forcing potential innovators and job creators to leave after being trained at our universities."

Conversely, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., criticized the new proposals.

"Yet again, the administration is acting unilaterally to change immigration law in a way that hurts American workers," he said.

"This will help corporations by further flooding a slack labor market, pulling down wages," he added.