President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will allow businesses to import another 35,000 foreign H-2B visa workers for working and middle-class jobs even as 11.7 million Americans remain jobless.
On Thursday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that the agency would allow businesses to import 35,000 more foreign H-2B visa workers to fill non-agricultural jobs in construction, hospitality, and landscaping from April 1 to September 30.
Specifically, about 23,500 of the H-2B visas will go to foreign workers who have previously come to the U.S. on the visa program, while 11,500 of the visas will go to Haitians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans.
The administration’s continued efforts to saturate the U.S. labor market with hundreds of thousands of more foreign workers in addition to the millions who already hold American jobs comes as about 11.7 million Americans are unemployed, but all of whom want full-time work.
Likewise, another 4.1 million Americans are unemployed, working part-time jobs but want full-time employment with better wages and good benefits.
“Instead of incentivizing the return of millions of American workers to the labor force by allowing the laws of supply and demand to set competitive wages, the Biden administration is enabling employers to keep wages low and fill jobs with cheap foreign labor,” said Dan Stein with the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The administration came to the decision to add more foreign H-2B visa workers to the U.S. labor market after 17 Senate Republicans joined 17 Senate Democrats in demanding more foreign workers for their business constituents.
Those Republicans included Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), James Risch (R-ID), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), John Cornyn (R-TX), Mike Crapo (R-ID), John Thune (R-SD), Susan Collins (R-ME), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Rand Paul (R-KY), John Barrasso (R-WY), and Tim Scott (R-SC).
Every year, businesses are allowed to import 66,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to take blue-collar, non-agricultural American jobs. Former President Donald Trump routinely brought in additional H-2B foreign visa workers for business to hire, and Biden is doing the same.
In December 2021 and January 2022, Mayorkas announced that he would allow businesses to import 40,000 more H-2B foreign visa workers.
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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