House Republicans have slipped a massive foreign worker expansion into their Department of Homeland Security 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.
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 DHS spending bill includes an expansion of the H-2B visa program which 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.
The provision included in the bill ensures that foreign workers who arrived in the U.S. on H-2B visas in the prior three years would not count against the annual cap.
Beck said the latest efforts to increase the number of foreign workers in the U.S. labor market, which has already reached a new high under President Joe Biden, are a major disappointment only weeks after Republicans united to fend off Democrats' mass immigration agenda.
"That's what makes this so deflating it's still about displacing American workers in favor of exploitable foreign workers," Beck said.
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