U.S. ‘Waives’ Through Foreign Farm Hands as Unemployment Soars
By Bob Dane
ImmigrationReform.com, April 3, 2020
. . .
https://www.immigrationreform.com/2020/04/03/farm-labor-h2a-visas-trump-immigrationreform-com/
U.S. ‘Waives’ Through Foreign Farm Hands as Unemployment Soars
In the face of skyrocketing unemployment, the federal government continues to put foreign workers on a fast track for U.S. agricultural jobs.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo authorized consular officers to waive the visa interview requirement for first-time and returning H-2 (semi-skilled, blue-collar) applicants, including farm workers.
“We anticipate the vast majority of otherwise qualified H-2 applicants will now be adjudicated without an interview,” Pompeo wrote in a March 26 memo.
Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, pitched in last month by raising the limit on H-2B (non-agricultural) visas. On Thursday, Wolf tweeted that he had put his order on hold, but Pompeo’s directive stands, even as nearly 10 million Americans filed new unemployment claims over the past two weeks.
Amidst the rapidly rising tide of joblessness, Fox News reported “there has been a particular focus on the H-2A [agricultural]program recently due to questions about the food supply in a time of the coronavirus crisis.”
“The failure to take necessary action to protect our food supply will result in bare shelves in grocery store produce aisles, not from panic buying, but as the result of the federal government directly causing a shortage of critical labor,” the Agriculture Workforce Coalition stated in a March 17 letter to Pompeo.
Last year, farm companies hired roughly 250,000 H-2A foreign workers. With no cap on such visas, and relentless pressure from the industry, Pompeo’s waiver opens the door to criminals and other miscreants.
The surreal scenario of foreign workers flooding into the U.S. at a time of historically accelerating unemployment would have appalled Cesar Chavez. The United Farm Workers founder, who would have turned 93 this week, railed against growers’ exploitation of illegal laborers, and despised the depressing effects foreign workers had on American wages.
The latest counterproductive and unnecessary turn of the screw highlighted a missed opportunity in Washington.
“The Trump administration could have used the coronavirus bill to address food security issues through mechanization grants and no-interest loans,” said R.J. Hauman, FAIR’s director of government relations.
“Instead, they bought into the agriculture lobby’s pathetic, despicable plea – that a country of over 320 million people on the cusp of record unemployment can’t get its own food harvested without cheap foreign labor.”
As
Breitbart News has reported,
U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare
of households headed by native-born Americans.
For example, a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers about $26 billion, more than the border wall, and that does not include the money taxpayers would have to fork up to subsidize the legal immigrant relatives of DACA illegal aliens.
Exclusive–Steve
Camarota: Every Illegal Alien Costs Americans $70K Over Their Lifetime
JOHN
BINDER
THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!
This is why you work From Jan - May
paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money
for you and your family.
Take, for example, an illegal alien
with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that
wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year,
if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets
an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing
and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no
deductible, no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts
and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and
books.
He qualifies for relief from high
energy bills.
If they are or become, aged, blind
or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can
qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car
insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language
signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his family receive the
equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.
Working Americans are lucky to have
$5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.
The American taxpayers also pay for
increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.
Cheap
labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people!
JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL
Here’s how it breaks
down; will make you want to be an illegal!
THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN
UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2
BILLION YEARLY!
Staggering expensive "cheap"
Mexican labor did not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to
Mexico. It's all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost
of the invasion, their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the
American people!
AMERICA: YOU’RE BETTER
OFF BEING AN ILLEGAL!!!
This annual income for an impoverished American family is
$10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on
each unaccompanied minor border crosser.
A study by Tom Wong
of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25
percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That
totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled
illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified
illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
“The Democrats had abandoned
their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when
what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.
DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE
As
Breitbart News has reported,
U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare
of households headed by native-born Americans.
Simultaneously,
illegal immigration next year is on track to soar to the
highest level in a decade, with a potential 600,000 border crossers expected.
“More than
750 million people want to migrate to another country permanently, according to
Gallup research published Monday, as 150 world leaders sign up to the
controversial UN global compact which critics say makes migration a human
right.” VIRGINIA HALE
For example, a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers about $26 billion, more than the border wall, and that does not include the money taxpayers would have to fork up to subsidize the legal immigrant relatives of DACA illegal aliens.
Exclusive–Steve
Camarota: Every Illegal Alien Costs Americans $70K Over Their Lifetime
Every illegal alien, over the
course of their lifetime, costs American taxpayers about $70,000, Center for
Immigration Studies Director of Research Steve Camarota says.
During an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart
News Daily, Camarota said his research has revealed the
enormous financial burden that illegal immigration has on America’s working and
middle class taxpayers in terms of public services, depressed wages, and
welfare.
“In a person’s lifetime, I’ve estimated that an illegal border
crosser might cost taxpayers … maybe over $70,000 a year as a net cost,”
Camarota said. “And that excludes the cost of their U.S.-born children, which
gets pretty big when you add that in.”
LISTEN:
“Once [an illegal alien] has a child, they can receive cash
welfare on behalf of their U.S.-born children,” Camarota explained. “Once they
have a child, they can live in public housing. Once they have a child, they can
receive food stamps on behalf of that child. That’s how that works.”
Camarota said the education levels of illegal aliens, border
crossers, and legal immigrants are largely to blame for the high level of
welfare usage by the f0reign-born population in the U.S., noting that new
arrivals tend to compete for jobs against America’s poor and working class
communities.
In past waves of mass immigration, Camarota said, the U.S. did
not have an expansive welfare system. Today’s ever-growing welfare system,
coupled with mass illegal and legal immigration levels, is “extremely
problematic,” according to Camarota, for American taxpayers.
The RAISE Act — reintroduced in the
Senate by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), David Perdue (R-GA), and
Josh Hawley (R-MO) — would cut legal immigration levels in half and convert the
immigration system to favor well-educated foreign nationals, thus relieving
American workers and taxpayers of the nearly five-decade-long wave of booming
immigration. Currently, mass legal immigration redistributes the
wealth of working and middle class Americans to the country’s top
earners.
“Virtually none of that existed in 1900 during the last great
wave of immigration, when we also took in a number of poor people. We didn’t
have a well-developed welfare state,” Camarota continued:
We’re not going to stop [the welfare state] tomorrow. So in
that context, bringing in less educated people who are poor is extremely
problematic for public coffers, for taxpayers in a way that it wasn’t in 1900
because the roads weren’t even paved between the cities in 1900. It’s just
a totally different world. And that’s the point of the RAISE Act is to
sort of bring in line immigration policy with the reality say of a large
government … and a welfare state. [Emphasis added]
The immigrants are not all coming to get welfare and they don’t
immediately sign up, but over time, an enormous fraction sign their
children up. It’s likely the case that of the U.S.-born children of
illegal immigrants, more than half are signed up for Medicaid — which
is our most expensive program. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart
News has reported, U.S. households headed by foreign-born
residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born
Americans.
Every year the U.S.
admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the vast majority
deriving from chain migration. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million. By 2023, the
Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant
population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S.
population.
Breitbart News
Daily airs
on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Powerful Ag Group Once Again Standing in the Way of Mandatory E-Verify
On Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) introduced the bipartisan AG and Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 6417) – legislation that would mandate E-Verify and create a new agricultural guest worker program. The bill’s introduction represents the first step in fulfilling a promise made by House Speaker Paul Ryan to hold a vote on an E-Verify/guest worker proposal by the August recess, in exchange for several members of Congress not signing the amnesty discharge petition.
The AG and Legal Workforce Act replaces the current H-2A agricultural guest worker program with a new, workable agricultural guest worker program, known as the H-2C program. The H-2C program is available to both seasonal and year-round agricultural employers, provides a generous visa allocation to ensure labor needs are met, provides much needed flexibility to minimize disruptions in farm operations, eliminates regulatory burdens, and contains accountability and enforcement provisions.
The AG and Legal Workforce Act also requires all U.S. employers to use E-Verify, the effective web-based program that protects jobs for legal workers. The bill also repeals the error-prone, paper-based I-9 system and replaces it with E-Verify. It contains a gradual phase-in for employers—starting with the largest employers first and eventually phasing in small businesses and agricultural employers.
While the guest worker provisions in the Ag and Legal Workforce Act are supported by over 200 agricultural groups including the American Farm Bureau Federation, one powerful organization is already taking credit for killing the proposal. Tom Nassif, president and CEO of Western Growers, an association representing growers of more than half the produce in the U.S., thanked his illegal labor dependent membership for lobbying against the bill as it was being drafted.
“We have been informed that the U.S. House of Representatives will NOT vote on legislation next week that would impose mandatory E-Verify (electronic verification of employment eligibility) with no fix for our existing workers,” Nassif wrote in an email last week. “Furthermore, our allies believe this legislation will likely not be voted before the August recess at all, due to our resolve. Those of you who took the time to call members of Congress made the difference. Let us never forget that when we act collectively, with a strong voice, we make real impact,” he added.
The response from Western Growers – which has long opposed any attempts to require E-Verify or reduce illegal immigration – is rightfully drawing the ire of some members of Congress. Representative Dan Newhouse (R-WA), an original cosponsor of the Ag and Legal Workforce Act, blasted Nassif and said that the vote promised by Ryan will still happen.
“It is disappointing that Tom Nassif, who just four years ago said immigration reform cannot wait, is now urging action to be delayed until next Congress,” Newhouse said. “Thankfully the speaker and majority leader have given their commitment to bring this bill to the floor and American farmers are very grateful.”
Stay tuned to FAIR for updates.
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