Hidden deep within a $91.5 billion funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), House Republicans have placed a massive expansion to the riddled-with-fraud H2-A foreign worker visa program. If you needed any further proof that the Republican Party leadership in DC hates the American people just as much as the Democrats do, this is it.
It’s as if the permanent Washington Republicans have learned nothing from President Donald Trump’s first magnificent term in office.
The DHS has next to nothing to do with foreign work visas. Yet that is where House Republicans chose to try to sneak this massive increase past the American people.
The legislation, written by Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, lifts the caps on the number of foreign workers who will be allowed into the country. It changes the H-2A visa rules so that more professions related to agriculture can begin replacing American workers with foreigners.
It changes the H-2A visa program, which under the Trump administration rewrites only allowed workers in seasonally so that the foreign workers can stay for up to three years.
At a time when America has been flooded with a catastrophic number of illegal aliens, and the economy is in an inflationary freefall, House Republicans looked around and decided, “We need a bunch more foreign workers to replace those awful Americans!”
Good grief.
Set aside the fact, for a moment, that the inflation we’re experiencing has been deliberately caused by Joe Biden. He didn’t have to strangle the Trump-era oil and gas renaissance that America was experiencing, but Biden did it anyway. Combine that with pandemic-era trillion-dollar spending bills, and you get runaway inflation.
We get all that.
Under normal circumstances, an inflationary period will balance out by American wages rising. When everything at the grocery store and the gas station costs more, wages are eventually going to go back up.
That’s in normal circumstances. By this point, working man’s wages should be around $30 an hour, and agricultural wages should have climbed to around $20 to $25 an hour.
But our leaders took a look around and decided to throw American workers under the bus, rather than allowing the market to function naturally by having wages increase. The massive influx of illegal aliens ensured that the wages of working-class and middle-class Americans would continue to be crushed downward.
Now the Republicans in the House are saying, “Oh, but these are legal immigrants! We like these ones!”
No. No, we do not, and this is not how this works.
Every H-2A visa worker brought into the country takes a job that should have gone to an American, and they do that job for a lower wage. Poll after poll shows that the American people don’t want legal aliens coming into the country any more than we want illegal ones—and we don’t want the illegals at all.
The H-2A visa scam is also a totally fraudulent program. In many cases, the workers get treated basically like slaves. A lawsuit earlier this year alleges that a Michigan blueberry farm brought in a bunch of H-2A foreigners and then paid them slave wages while forcing them to live in absolutely squalid conditions.
Americans can’t compete with slave wages. That’s why free trade agreements don’t work, and it’s why immigration during an inflationary period is a suicidal idea.
The Republican-led House Appropriations Committee has already passed this DHS funding bill that will increase the number of foreign workers dramatically.
Now it remains to be seen whether the conservatives in the rest of the House and the American people, can shame the Republican caucus into abandoning this disastrous H-2A proposal.
