Exclusive–Mo Brooks: Agricultural Amnesty an ‘Attack on Blue Collar Workers’

A plan to provide the agricultural industry with an unlimited inflow of illegal alien workers and H-2A foreign visa workers is “an attack on blue-collar workers” in America, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says.

In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks slammed the passage of an agricultural amnesty plan — which nearly all House Democrats and 34 House Republicans supported — that he said will further crush the wages and job prospects of America’s blue-collar workforce.

Despite this, Brooks said, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other lobbying arms of the cheap foreign labor industry “put in tens of millions of dollars each election cycle to ensure that they elect House members and Senators who are anti-American worker and for lower wages based on a surge in the labor supply by illegal alien labor and lawful immigrant labor.”

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“This amnesty bill is an attack on the American people and in particular, it is an attack on blue-collar workers — people who work with their hands, people who already have a tough time making ends meet,” Brooks said.

“And the reason it is an attack on those individuals is because it does two things ultimately: One, it increases competition by illegal alien labor that in turn takes jobs from hard-working American citizens,” Brooks continued. And two, it creates a huge surge in the labor supply, that in turn … it’s the wages of the least among us that are going to be suppressed because of this effort by the agricultural industry and the Democrats.”

Brooks said that while the agricultural industry will be able to reduce U.S. wages for their employees under the plan, it is American taxpayers who will be footing the bill to subsidize this cheap foreign labor.

“The average cost of an illegal alien, on a net basis, is in the neighborhood of $9,000 to $10,000 per year, for each … illegal alien,” Brooks said. “And so what you’re looking at is the agricultural industry is trying to get subsidized labor and the cost of that subsidy is on city taxpayers, county taxpayers, state taxpayers, and federal taxpayers. That is wrong for any industry to try to shove its labor costs on the backs of American taxpayers, yet that is exactly what the agricultural industry does with this amnesty legislation.”

While the White House has threatened vetos of other Democrat-led legislation in recent weeks, President Trump has yet to say whether he will veto the agricultural amnesty. Brooks said he is “very much concerned” over why the administration has yet to take a public position on the amnesty plan.

“I’m very much concerned about what’s going to happen in the U.S. Senate,” Brooks said. “I’m also very much concerned that the Trump administration has not issued a veto warning should this legislation pass the Senate. That is most disconcerting that the Trump administration is considering giving amnesty to some number of millions of illegal aliens.”

During debate over HR 5038 — Farm Amnesty bill — @RepLaMalfa says illegal aliens GOOD, American workers LAZY pic.twitter.com/Zd2ikGFj5o

— NumbersUSA (@NumbersUSA) December 11, 2019

Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants with the overwhelming majority, nearly 70 percent, coming through the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign nationals to the country. The mass inflow of legal immigrants is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who are added to the U.S. population annually.

Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants. Similarly, research has revealed how Americans’ wages are crushed by the country’s high immigration levels.

For every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations, their weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent, Camarota finds. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent since 17.5 percent of the workforce is foreign-born.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.