Farms across the United States have ballooned the number of foreign H-2A visa workers imported to take agricultural jobs, just as Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are seeking more foreign workers than ever before.
Annually, the federal government allows U.S. farms to import an unlimited number of foreign workers through the H-2A visa program specifically to take agricultural jobs. The program, as Breitbart News has chronicled for years, is fraught with fraud and abuse.
In the first half of Fiscal Year 2023, which runs from October 2022 through March 2023, farms imported nearly 200,000 foreign H-2A visa workers, with most going to farms in Florida, California, Washington, Georgia, and North Carolina.
The figure indicates a 10 percent increase in foreign H-2A visa workers arriving in the U.S. to take jobs compared to the same time last year. By 2025, the number of foreign visa workers imported to the U.S. through the program is expected to reach almost half a million.
Meanwhile, a handful of Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are looking to slip a massive expansion of the H-2A visa program into a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, Breitbart News reported.
The $91.5 billion spending bill would loosen H-2A visa rules so that more industries related to the agricultural sector could import foreign workers, and it rewrites the program so that jobs do not have to be seasonal or temporary.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) sought to have the foreign worker expansion stripped from the spending bill, according to the Washington Post, but was rebuked by Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) and David Valadao (R-CA), both of whom count agriculture special interest groups as major donors.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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