House Republicans have set a deadline for when their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, which includes a massive foreign worker expansion, can be amended. If Republicans keep the expansion, it will come as more than 44 million Americans are out of the workforce.
Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have included provisions in a year-end DHS funding bill that will hugely expand the number of foreign workers in the United States labor market just as annual data shows millions of Americans are struggling to reenter and stay in the workforce.
This week, the committee set a deadline of Sept. 6 for when lawmakers can file amendments to the funding bill. The Heritage Foundation has urged Republicans to strip the bill of the two provisions that would expand the inflow of foreign workers to the U.S.
“Such substantive changes to legal immigration programs should be debated and voted on in the authorizing committees, not snuck into an appropriations bill,” the Heritage Foundation’s Lora Ries and R.J. Hauman wrote in an analysis of the bill.
The $91.5 billion funding bill, as currently written, loosens 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.
Currently, the H-2A visa program 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.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, the H-2A visa program has been used to import cheaper foreign workers. Most recently, a farm in Washington reached a $3.4 million settlement for firing its mostly female farmworkers and replacing them with mostly male foreign H-2A visa workers.
The other provision expands the H-2B visa program, which currently 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.
By loosening annual cap rules, the funding bill would likely bring at least an additional 20,000 foreign H-2B visa workers to the U.S., who compete directly against working-class Americans for often high-paying blue-collar jobs.
Like the H-2A visa program, the H-2B visa program is fraught with abuse.
Such an expansion of foreign workers in the nation’s labor market would come even as recent research shows that there are 44.3 million American-born men and women from 16 to 64 years old who are not in the workforce at all — almost ten million more than the year 2000, when 34.4 million were not in the workforce — not including those counted as unemployed.
At the same time, foreign workers have seen their share of the labor market hit the highest level in almost 30 years at more than 18 percent, with close to 30 million now holding U.S. jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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