President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is giving businesses an additional 20,000 more foreign H-2B visa workers to hire for working class jobs in the United States even as nearly 13 million Americans remain jobless.
In an announcement on Monday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he has approved an additional 20,000 H-2B visas to provide non-agricultural businesses with more foreign workers. About 13,500 of the visas are allocated for foreign workers who have previously been approved for H-2B visas and the other 6,500 are for nationals of Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
“DHS is taking action to protect American businesses and create opportunities that will expand lawful pathways to the United States for workers from the Northern Triangle countries and Haiti,” Mayorkas said in a statement.
The expansion of the labor market by the Biden administration comes as 6.9 million Americans are unemployed, including 11.2 percent who are teenagers looking for entry-level jobs, but all of whom want full-time work.
Another 5.9 million Americans are out of the labor force entirely but want full-time jobs, and 4.3 million Americans remain underemployed — working part-time jobs while seeking full-time employment.
Every year, businesses are allowed to import 66,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to take blue-collar, non-agricultural jobs in the U.S. Former President Donald Trump’s administration routinely brought in additional H-2B foreign visa workers for business to hire, and President Joe Biden’s administration is doing the same.
The H-2B visa program has been widely used by businesses to drag down the wages of American workers in landscaping, conservation work, the meatpacking industry, the construction industry, and fishing jobs, a 2019 study by the Center for Immigration Studies finds.
When comparing the wages of H-2B foreign workers to the national wage average for each blue-collar industry, about 21 out of 25 of the industries offered lower wages to foreign workers than Americans.
Annually, the U.S. gives green cards to about 1.2 million legal immigrants, while another 1.4 million foreign workers are admitted every year to take American jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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