House Republicans have slipped a massive foreign worker expansion into their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, a blow to the GOP’s promise to protect the nation’s working class from powerful special interests.
After markups and hearings, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee approved the DHS spending bill which would blow the lid off blue-collar migration caps to the United States, spurring an influx of foreign visa workers in the labor market with whom working class Americans would have to compete for jobs.
“Who represents the working class? This bill suggests it’s not necessarily Republicans,” Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA told Breitbart News.
Specifically, the $91.5 billion funding measure would loosen H-2A visa rules so that more industries related to the agricultural sector could import foreign workers and rewrites the program so that jobs do not have to be seasonal or temporary.
The H-2A visa program, as currently implemented, allows U.S. farms to annually outsource an unlimited number of American agricultural jobs to foreign workers, who can extend their stay for up to three years.
Fraud and abuse are widespread across the program, with one recent lawsuit accusing a western Michigan farm of trafficking foreign H-2A visa workers into blueberry picking jobs where they were paid slave wages and housed in egregiously poor conditions.
Most notoriously, earlier this year, black Americans scored a settlement against two U.S. farms along the Mississippi Delta after they were fired and replaced with foreign H-2A visa workers from South Africa.
Beck called the H-2A visa program a “medieval system” that relies on “cheap back-breaking labor while other countries are mechanizing and workers are being paid high wages to man machines.”
“This is a way to push off mechanization indefinitely when you have relatively compliant, affordable labor,” he said. “The people who broker these visa programs advertise it as ‘It will save you money.'”
In addition, the DHS spending bill includes an expansion of the H-2B visa program which allows U.S. employers to import about 66,000 foreign workers for seasonal non-agricultural jobs in industries like construction, landscaping, hospitality, and food services, among others.
The provision included in the bill, though, ensures that foreign workers who arrived in the U.S. on H-2B visas in the prior three years would not count against the annual cap. Beck estimates that the provision could see at least 200,000 additional foreign H-2B visa workers in the labor market.
“Here we are at a time with some job growth and low unemployment. The conditions are there for wage gains … many are in good industries like construction and the service industry,” Beck told Breitbart News. “We’re seeing improvement in wages but nothing to indicate a massive labor shortage. We’re seeing a closing of the racial wealth gap and we’re getting Americans off the sidelines. This expansion cuts that off.”
Like the H-2A visa program, the H-2B visa program has long been documented for its history of displacing blue-collar Americans from their jobs and lowering wages.
Expanding the H-2A and H-2B visa programs flies in the face of House Republicans’ recent efforts to dramatically cut down unfair foreign workforce competition against working class Americans — a critical component of the party’s pitch to voters which vows to represent their interests over powerful, politically connected special interests.
In May, for instance, House Republicans passed H.R. 2, a sweeping border security and immigration control measure that includes mandatory nationwide E-Verify. The provision, which threatens companies with fines if they knowingly hire illegal aliens, was seen as a historic victory for the GOP after decades of business interests lobbying to keep E-Verify out of federal legislation.
Beck said the latest efforts to increase the number of foreign workers in the U.S. labor market, which has already reached a new high under President Joe Biden, are a major disappointment only weeks after Republicans united to fend off Democrats’ mass immigration agenda.
“That’s what makes this so deflating … it’s still about displacing American workers in favor of exploitable foreign workers,” Beck said. “For all the good that H.R. 2 would do, this would take all the wind out of that sail.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.