Ten GOP representatives joined the Democrat farmworker amnesty bill, even though the bill would push many of their own voters out of jobs and their own districts, critics assert.
Republican Washington state farmer Rep. Dan Newhouse leads the ten GOP cosponsors on H.R.1603.
They include Reps. Elisa Stefanik (NY), Mark Amodei (NV), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Doug LaMalfa (CA), Cathy McMorris Rogers (WA), Mike Simpson (ID), Fred Upton (MI), David Valadao (CA), and Jefferson Van Drew (NJ).
Additional legislators may be trying to dodge criticism from voters by hiding their support for H.R. 1603, titled “To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide for terms and conditions for nonimmigrant workers performing agricultural labor or services, and for other purposes.” The bill is expected to come to the floor for a vote next week.
“Congress should not debate nor vote on any further significant legislation while American citizens are cut off from their representatives and staffers by armed troops and a pandemic,” William Gheen, the founder of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC grassroots group, stated in a press release.
“President Biden and lawmakers who promote or try to advance Amnesty legislation for illegals during this pandemic are causing a dangerous surge on our borders when we already have 17 million Americans out of work and illegals with COVID-19 being released by the Biden administration,” Gheen asserted.
The bill “will attract more illegal immigration into America while making future border or immigration law enforcement impossible by giving the Democratic Party millions of new voters to mobilize in exchange for government jobs, welfare, benefits, and incentives,” ALIPAC stated.
The H.R. 1603 legislation is a March 8 version of the H.R. 1537 amnesty bill, which was introduced on March 3 and had only one GOP supporter: Dan Newhouse.
The amnesty bill would devastate rural towns by giving employers an unlimited supply of cheap H-2A visa workers, Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA, said. She told Breitbart News:
Once you give them amnesty, the [current illegal] farmworkers are going to leave agriculture. So the growers are going to have to replace that labor force. If the borders are open, they’ll just do it with more illegals. But if they have to use E-Verify [to ensure legal hiring], they’ll hire H-2As and pay them less.
So all wages across the industry will go down, or at least be stagnant, and the farm communities will basically empty out more than what has already happened. Towns will dry up because local wages for Americans will decline — and the visa workers will send most of their wages back to their home countries.
It will basically be the exacerbation of the rural-to-urban population shift that we’ve already been seeing [nationwide]. Businesses in those [rural] communities will shut down because there won’t be enough consumers. It means that [private-sector] services will diminish because there won’t be enough consumers. Tax receipts will tank, which is why [government-provided] services will decline. Drug use will increase.
In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Rob Law, Center for Immigration Studies legislative and regulatory director and former policy chief of President Donald Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, said agriculture amnesty “is a special interest handout … it’s government-sanctioned serfdom.”
“This immigration bill is far more harmful [to rural communities] than any other provision Congress would ever give our rural communities,” he said, adding:
It completely forecloses on job opportunities for rural Americans. Are they supposed to learn how to code or build solar panels? Their livelihood is in the rural community, and the importation of a permanent foreign workforce will shut them out entirely. The [rural] towns will eventually collapse. The tax base of citizens will be depleted, while the schools, hospitals, and other public facilities will get overrun by the needs of the foreign-born workforce. Americans will leave, further straining the very limited resources in those communities.
…
The Democratic Party has made it abundantly clear that they are the party of immigration lawlessness, mass legal and illegal immigration, and do not care about the impacts on working Americans. With that being their platform, you would think that every Republican would look very suspiciously upon any immigration proposal that was put forward by the Democrat Party.
The Democrats' amnesty for illegal ag. workers buys off corporate opposition by offering endless, cheap, indentured H-2A visa workers.
But no jobs for Americans.
Many more rural towns would die as the Americans depart with their kids, spending & taxes. https://t.co/cLYy3abHzx— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 9, 2021
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