GOP and Democrat politicians are asking the federal government to help reinflate the government-created cheap labor bubble that burst in 2020, just as employers have begun offering higher wages to recruit Americans.
“Due to ongoing workforce shortages our country continues to face, American farmers continue to utilize the H-2A guest worker visa program,” 35 legislators said in a December 21 letter sent to the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security, which is headed by the pro-migration zealot, Alejandro Mayorkas. But federal travels curbs against the new omicron epidemic has stranded 7,000 South African seasonal workers, the legislators said, adding:
Without an exemption to the recently imposed travel restrictions, South African H-2A worker absences will limit the ability of American farms to continue production of food, fuel, and fiber for our nation during this critical time.
That letter was signed by at least 12 Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik (D-NY), who runs the House Republican Conference leadership office.
On the same day, 21 Democrats asked Mayorkas to accelerate the award of work permits to the imported wives of Indian contract workers. Their Indian husbands are using H-1B and L-1 visas to take white-collar jobs needed by U.S. graduates. “Processing delays have left [the spouses’] families without a second income, forcing them to dip into their savings, sell their homes, and take other drastic measures,” said the letter, led by Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC), and also signed by Kathy Porter (D-CA).
President Joe Biden’s administration is granting some of those requests. For example, December Mayorkas approved the inflow of an extra 20,000 H-2B visa workers to fill a wide variety of seasonal jobs — such as hotel maids, kitchen staff, and landscaping crews. In 2021, employers could not get visa workers from Trump, and so they filled many of those seasonal jobs with wage offers to untrained Americans recruited from urban districts.
There is no shortage of labor in a nation of 190 million working-age people and roughly 150 million jobs.
Instead, there is a massive gap between what Americans want to be paid and what employers and investors expect to pay them.
In California, employers are reluctantly closing the gap by offering higher wages. The Wall Street Journal reported December 22:
Logistics businesses in [California’s] Inland Empire are battling to bring on and keep workers amid the tightest U.S. labor market in years, offering signing bonuses, starting salaries of $20 an hour or more and perks such as flexible schedules.
“The market has gotten that tight,” said Bill Fraine, chief commercial officer for GXO Logistics Inc., which has tripled its workforce in the region during the past two years to about 3,900 employees, and still has 600 vacancies. “You’re creating much more competition, which means much more pricing power for the employees to get into the job.”
[…]
The push to hire has led businesses such as Ingram Micro Inc., a third-party logistics company that serves many big-box retailers, to grant pension and other benefits to full-time employees on the first day of work. Bill Ross, executive vice president of global operations, said companies can no longer compete simply on wages. “People have a lot of choices,” he said.
In Georgia, warehouse and retail companies are hiring Americans from the low-wage jobs that were created in the 30-year cheap labor bubble. “It was nothing personal,” hotel maid Monique Rolle told the Washington Post. “Target was paying more, so I dropped [working at] the hotel.”
The cheap labor bubble burst in 2020 when President Donald Trump and the coronavirus shut down the post-1990 government-delivered supply of migrant foreign labor.
Hasit Patel is an Indian legal immigrant who operates the franchise budget hotel in Georgia, where Rolle worked for roughly $8.50 an hour before she took her $15-an-hour job at Target. Patel’s business plan assumed the federal government would continue to extract cheap labor from poor countries, according to what he told the Washington Post:
[His] struggle to find [replacement] labor felt like a blow to his whole notion of what made America great. An immigrant from India, he believed that the health of the U.S. economy was protected by a constant refreshing of the workforce, an injection of striving immigrants willing to take on some of the unpleasant jobs that many Americans are loath to do — like cleaning [his] hotel rooms.
“I can’t compete with the warehouses for wages,” Patel said as he asked the federal government to import cheap labor. “The government should let us get people from India, even just for six months.”
Overall, the federal government imported five million fewer foreigners from 2010 to 2020 — including three million fewer from 2017 to 2020 — compared to prior decades, according to recent reports.
The Democrats’ pending Build Back Better bill would import millions of extra foreign workers, consumers, and renters into the U.S. economy over the next several years. The letters from the House legislators are asking Biden’s deputies to reinflate the bubble by pumping more H4EAD and L-2 white-collar workers and more H-2A farmworkers into the U.S. economy.
Mayorkas is trying to reinflate the labor bubble — despite President Joe Biden’s calls for a wage-raising “tight labor” economy.
In 2021, Mayorkas helped import an additional 1 million migrants across the southern border, including at least 700,000 job-seekers. Mayorkas also helped bring in hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants, admitted roughly 50,000 Afghan migrants, minimized curbs on the growing number of foreign visitors who get U.S. jobs instead of going home.
The H-2A letter was signed by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich), Troy Balderson (R-OH), Glenn Thompson (R-PA), Dusty Johnson (R-SD), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), Troy Balderson (R-OH), Peter Meijer (R-MI), Ron Estes (R-KS), Reps. Frank Lucas (R-OK), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), Tom Cole (R-OK), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Tom Emmer (R-MN).
In November, Emmer told Breitbart News that immigration is a pocketbook issue for voters.
“Well, the immigration issue is a pocketbook issue … You’re talking about immigration being a kitchen table issue and how it impacts [voters]. The bottom line is that polling showed us this is still a very potent issue for Americans. This is something that, while some people would want to write it off, this is something that Americans care about, and this administration has completely punted on the immigration issue and talk about incompetence.
But fewer than half of likely voters trust House GOP on immigration issues.
Many polls show that Americans want to like immigrants and immigration. But the bipartisan federal government has exploited that openness since 1990 to extract tens of millions of migrants from poor countries to serve U.S. businesses as workers, consumers, and renters.
That economic strategy damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and also raises their rents.
The strategy also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
A wide variety of little-publicized polls does show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
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