GOP Win: Kevin McCarthy Blocks Democrats’ Migration Expansion

McCarthy
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Nearly all GOP legislators voted Thursday afternoon to block a massive inflow of wage-cutting migrant workers and to stop another $300 million giveaway to Ukraine.

All Democrats voted for the amendment that would give away American jobs to foreigners who get H-2B and H-2A visas, and also to spend another $300 million for Ukraine’s war with Russia.

Credit for the successful GOP win goes to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca).

He is trying to keep the GOP caucus united while passing agency funding bills for spending in 2024, which starts on October 1.

The amendment vote was part of the run-up to the vote on the budget for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which took place late Thursday night.

File/Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., conducts a news conference in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, July 25, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

For months, the DHS bill has been delayed by GOP splits over the Ukraine war and disagreements over President Joe Biden’s open-border policies. It has also been divided by McCarthy’s effort to bypass regular debates by stuffing Congress’ 12 spending bills into a huge “Continuing Resolution.”

But McCarthy kept the party’s populist and business factions together and late Thursday, he passed a DHS spending bill with 220 voters against the Democrats’ 208 nays.

His DHS bill includes careful policy changes — not just showy budget cuts — that block Biden’s deputies from welcoming, transporting, and housing millions of job-seeking, wage-cutting migrants for jobs that would otherwise go to better-paid Americans.

The Hill.com reported:

The DHS funding bill includes $91.515 billion in total discretionary spending for the department. The money includes more than $2 billion to build a wall along the southern border, $496 million for 22,000 Border Patrol agents, and upwards of $3.55 billion for custody operations.

Republicans say the bill will provide millions in savings by rejecting funds for electric vehicles and DHS Headquarters consolidation, as well as rejecting Biden administration funding requests for emergency food and shelter for migrants, among other measures.

However, these provisions do not become law until the House and the Democrat-run Senate agree on a common bill, and Biden signs the shared bill.

Biden and the Democrats in the Senate — plus some GOP Senators — are likely to fight many of the House’s beneficial provisions.  Biden recently asked for another $3.3 billion to help bring more migrants into Americans’ cities, workplaces, and neighborhoods — in addition to the billions approved in late 2022 by the then-Democratic majority in the House.

The Democrats’ ability to fight, however, is risky because there is growing public opposition to the Democrats’ policy of importing migrant workers, renters, and consumers.

Even if the House reforms are approved by the Senate and Biden, Biden’s border secretary will likely refuse to implement the reforms. For example, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas blocked border construction even though Congress had provided the instructions and money for the project to continue.

The House votes are complicated because McCarthy has a small majority, and often must allow members to make showpiece voters against or for particular legislation.

For example, the vote against the $300 million helped McCarthy pass the amendment against the visas and the DHS bill. However, many GOP legislators also supported the Ukraine war, and so they helped the Democrats pass a later amendment that restored the $300 million in war spending. The restoration amendment passed 311 yeas to 117 nays.

Also, on Thursday, the House passed the Pentagon’s $826 spending bill with some useful civic policy changes. Politico reported:

The legislation would block funding to carry out the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy. It also includes limits on medical care for transgender troops, diversity programs and efforts to combat climate change.

The fight over visa workers comes after business groups looked for ways to sneak through a wage-cutting law in 2024.

The business groups were stymied when the growing GOP opposition to labor migration prompted the GOP to pass their H.R. 2 reforms in May without any Democratic votes.

In reaction, the business groups worked with Democrats and some donor-pressured Republicans to win a committee amendment greatly expanding the cheap-labor H-2 and H-2B programs.

The uncapped H-2A program provides farm companies with an unlimited inflow of seasonal H-2A workers for a wide variety of farm jobs.

The H-2B program provides labor for a vast range of season work at ski resorts, hotels, restaurants, and other workplaces that would otherwise have to hire and train under-employed Americans.

The cheap labor flowing through those programs helps keep many Americans out of the workforce, reduces high-tech investment, reduces consumer spending in rural counties, and expands abuse of migrants nationwide.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) described the visa giveaway that was buried in the draft spending bill:

A provision inserted to benefit non-agricultural employers would blow the lid off the 66,000 annual cap on H-2B guest workers by exempting returning visa holders from counting against that limit, as though they won’t have the same harmful [pocketbook] impact on similarly skilled American workers if they’ve been here before … [Employers also] want an end to the temporary or seasonal nature of the [uncapped] H-2A program … [because] sectors of the agricultural industry, such as dairy and sheepherding that are neither seasonal nor temporary have not had access to the H-2A program.

Senate Democrats will likely try to get the visa expansion in the final bill — even though it directly hurts job prospects for many urban Latino and black voters.

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