Report: Companies Pay Imported Workers With Citizenship Cards

Many low-wage employers are importing cheap foreign labor by offering them immigration and citizenship instead of pay, so helping boost profits by sidelining blue-collar Americans.

The companies can sideline Americans and hire lower-wage foreigners because of the federal citizenship-instead-of-pay EB-3 green card immigration program.

Each year, the federal governments EB-3 program offers 5,000 green cards to unskilled foreign employees of American companies. The green cards can be converted into citizenship cards after five years. It is a small corner of the fed’s cheap-labor immigration policy, which provides roughly 1 million green cards to foreign consumers and workers each year, including 150,000 cards to high-skill foreign employees of American companies.

EB-3 allows employers to hire thousands of low-skill foreign workers by promising to help them file for one of the 5,000 EB-3 immigration cards.

The 5,000-per-year immigration cards are effectively a hugely valuable, taxpayer-paid, deferred bonus for the foreign workers, their spouses, children and chain-migration relatives. Those benefits of a card are so large that many foreign workers pay tens of thousands of dollars to middlemen so so they can work at low-wage EB-3 jobs in the United States.

The huge costs of that bonus are paid by all Americans, and they include classroom spaces for the foreign children and health coverage for older parents, alongside many other welfare and anti-poverty programs. The economic costs paid by Americans also include reduced pressure on companies to hire and train Americans at good wages, and reduced pressure to buy American-made labor-saving machinery.

However, agency officials working for President Donald Trump have begun to tighten curbs on the cheap-labor immigration program, which was created by Congress. According to ProPublica:

As the program has accelerated in recent years, it has been co-opted by a handful of companies and foreign consultants who have used it to bring in immigrants willing to work for low pay in often-dangerous jobs. In the U.S., the program is now dominated by a handful of poultry processors with poor safety records, one janitorial firm and a single fast-food franchisee. Overseas, a cottage industry of migration agents has popped up charging steep fees for “migration assistance,” even as the law bars the selling of green card sponsorship and other recruiting fees …

Demand is now so high that some foreign migration consultants have developed a lucrative niche charging between $20,000 and $130,000 for assistance accessing the jobs offered by employers in the program, which usually pay less than $20,000 a year. Turning the common immigration narrative upside down, the program often attracts middle-class professionals, such as engineers like Yeom and office workers, who are willing to take a steep fall down the economic ladder for the chance to raise their children in the U.S. …

Beginning at the end of the Obama administration and accelerating under President Donald Trump, U.S. immigration agents and embassy officials have been clamping down on the program and increasing reviews of visa petitions, according to immigration attorneys, employers and foreign workers.

Read the entire story here.

The ProPublica article focuses on workers hired by the chicken industry, which includes Case Farms. According to the article,  “The Labor Department has certified [green cards for] 568 foreign workers for Case Farms in the past three years.”

The EB-3 program is established by Congress, and it will continue — despite agency curbs — until it is repealed.

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.

Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a large percentage of the nation’s annual income has shifted to investors and away from employees.