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.