Experts at the Heritage Foundation say House Republicans ought to axe a massive foreign worker expansion slipped into their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill.
Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are looking to hugely expand the number of foreign workers in the United States labor market just as annual data shows millions of Americans are struggling to re-enter and stay in the workforce.
The Republicans’ $91.5 billion DHS funding bill would blow the lid off blue-collar migration caps, spurring an influx of foreign workers through the H-2A and H-2B visa programs with whom working class Americans would have to compete for jobs.
Effectively, the bill loosens H-2A agricultural 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.
Likewise, the bill expands the H-2B non-agricultural visa program by ensuring foreign workers who arrived in the U.S. on H-2B visas in the prior three years would not count against the annual cap of about 66,000. The provision could see at least 200,000 additional foreign H-2B visa workers in the U.S. labor market as a result.
Heritage Foundation’s Lora Ries and R.J. Hauman are asking Republicans to strip the foreign worker expansion from the bill, writing that “such substantive changes to legal immigration programs should be debated and voted on in the authorizing committees, not snuck into an appropriations bill.”
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) sought to have the foreign worker expansion stripped from the bill, according to the Washington Post, but was rebuked by Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) and David Valadao (R-CA), who count agriculture special interest groups as major donors.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, both the H-2A and H-2B visa programs are filled with fraud and abuse — where U.S. companies have been found to slash workers’ wages, fire Americans and hire foreigners, and engage in labor trafficking.
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.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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