A nursery based in Miami, Florida, is accused of discriminating against qualified Americans for blue-collar, agricultural jobs in Georgia, importing foreign H-2A visa workers instead.
This month, the Department of Labor announced that a judge affirmed the agency’s investigation into Pure Beauty Farm Inc. — requiring the nursery to pay almost $200,000 in penalties and nearly $18,000 in back wages to one particular employee.
As part of the agency’s findings, Pure Beauty Farm Inc. allegedly gave preferential treatment to foreign H-2A visa workers in the hiring process specifically for agricultural jobs at its Greensboro, Georgia, farm.
In total, Pure Beauty Farm Inc. rejected applications from 29 qualified Americans after allegedly requiring them to provide paperwork showing they had prior nursery work experience, a requirement not asked of its foreign H-2A visa hires.
Pure Beauty Farm Inc., in addition, allegedly violated housing rules for the H-2A visa program by shoving foreign workers into close quarters with debris, unusable fire alarm systems, mold damage, and unclear bathrooms, among other issues.
Rather than being banned from importing foreign H-2A visa workers, though, the agency is allowing the nursery to continue using the program with third-party oversight for the next three years.
The H-2A visa program allows U.S. agricultural companies to annually outsource an unlimited number of American jobs to foreign workers who can extend their stay for up to three years. The foreign families of H-2A visa workers can also come to the U.S. on H-4 visas.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, the program is often used to replace Americans and preserve the low cost of agricultural labor.
In 1997, a little more than 16,000 foreign visa workers were imported to take American agriculture jobs. By 2021, that number ballooned to a record 258,000 foreign visa workers — an increase in the H-2A visa program of more than 1,500 percent in less than 25 years.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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