President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that will temporarily halt the issuance of certain green cards as he uses the coronavirus pandemic to push long-stalled immigration measures during an election year. But he backed away from initial plans to suspend guest worker programs after business groups reached out to the White House in outrage at the possibility of losing access to foreign labor.

The proclamation excludes guest worker programs for temporary nonimmigrant visas for hundreds of thousands of workers a year, including farm workers, software engineers and others in fields deemed to have labor shortages. It also does not apply to green-card applicants already in the United States.