President Joe Biden will import nearly 65,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to take blue-collar jobs as 11.6 million Americans are jobless and another 3.7 million are underemployed.
In October, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that the administration would be allowing businesses to import close to 65,000 additional H-2B foreign visa workers to take nonagricultural jobs in construction, meatpacking, and landscaping, among other industries.
On Tuesday, Mayorkas said the plan had been finalized.
“The Department is making supplemental H-2B visas available earlier than ever, ensuring that American businesses can plan for their peak season labor needs,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “At a time of record job growth, these visas will also provide a safe and lawful pathway to the United States for noncitizens prepared to take jobs that are not filled by American workers.”
Specifically, the H-2B visas will go to 20,000 nationals from Haiti and northern Central American countries as well as 45,000 foreign workers who have previously been rewarded the visas.
Biden’s Labor Secretary Marty Walsh previously laid out the administration’s plan to fill unfilled American jobs with foreign workers, rather than pull jobless Americans from the labor market sidelines.
“If those 11 million jobs had to be filled tomorrow, we certainly don’t have enough people in the United States to fill those jobs … the issue of workers has to be addressed and the only way you can do it is through immigration,” Walsh said.
The move comes as about 11.6 million Americans remain jobless. Another roughly 3.7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs but want full-time employment.
Already, businesses are allowed to import 66,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to take blue-collar, nonagricultural American jobs annually. 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 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 found.
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. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are added to the labor market every year, many on work permits given to them by the federal government.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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