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Despite High Unemployment,White House Invites More Foreign Workers

By Joe Guzzardi

No sooner had employers wailed that a dire worker shortage might put their businesses on the brink than President Biden rewarded them with 22,000 new employment-based visas. The I-can’t-find-workers is employers’ annual lament, and superficially at least, this year they lay blame on the coronavirus pandemic. Frenzied media reporting may have scared some workers away from the labor markets. Others on the sideline are reaping the benefits from Biden’s financial largesse in the form of stimulus relief checks.

With lightening-like speed, the Department of Homeland Security, acting in conjunction with the Department of Labor, announced that the 22,000 bump in H-2B visas for temporary, nonagriculture workers would ensure that American businesses have easy access to the labor pool they allegedly need to recover successfully and to contribute to the economic health of local communities. Included under the H-2B umbrella are jobs in landscaping, construction and hospitality – work that Americans will perform.

While the DHS swamp-speak sounds convincing, the harsh reality is that employers want more cheap labor, and they know that Biden is the soft touch who will provide it. Added to the 66,000 H-2B visas already authorized for the current fiscal year, employers will have the flexibility to hire 88,000 foreign-born workers.

In the fiercely competitive arena of most fraud-ridden among the employment-based visas, the H-2B is near or at the top. A few years ago, the Government Accountability Office reviewed several closed cases that involved employers who had hired H-2B employees. The GAO’s findings showed employers’ blatant disregard for labor rights and human dignity.

In South Dakota, hotel owners who employed H-2B workers were found guilty of nine counts of conspiracy, holding people in peonage, making false statements and visa fraud. In Louisiana, 87 Indian nationals paid at least $20,000 each for H-2B visas to work in construction, but were never employed by the construction company. The construction company owner plead guilty to conspiracy, and others were found guilty of conspiracy, money laundering and 14 counts of encouraging and inducing illegal immigration.

In Virginia, hospitality industry employers, later linked to organized crime, fraudulently obtained 3,800 H-2B labor certifications but leased the workers to undisclosed businesses not listed on the visa petitions. The criminals defrauded the Internal Revenue Service of $7.4 million in payroll taxes, and eventually plead guilty to conspiracy, visa fraud and tax evasion.

A subsequent Economic Policy Institute analysis found that in the vast majority of H-2B visa occupations, Americans’ wages were stagnant or declined, a direct consequence of more overseas employees in the domestic labor market. Despite the year-after-year outcry from employers, no evidence exists of a labor shortage.

And as the economy slowly climbs out from the pandemic lockdown, employer shortage claims to which Biden has given credence by offering more H-2B visas ring hallow. The U-6, or real unemployment rate, which includes the underemployed, the marginally attached and discouragedworkers, is 10.7 percent, which represents about 17.4 million Americans.

As Biden’s DHS announced the H-2B visa increase, small towns across America are engulfed in what one journalist described as “a permanent atmosphere of despair.” Most people, if they work at all, earn barely enough to eke by. USA Today profiled such a town, tiny and poor Ogdensburg, New York. Even before COVID-19, life in Ogdensburg was a struggle. Census Bureau data showed that the median house in the city of 10,000 people sold for $68,000; the average family earns $42,000 a year, and 2,300 residents live below the family-of-four $26,500 federal poverty guideline.

Ogdensburg’s poverty rate is 75 percent higher than the rest of New York. Post-pandemic, the city coffers are near-empty; the hospital furloughed 174 staffers, and restaurants, grocery stores and the few local businesses are hanging on by a thread. Other American small towns are undergoing similar prolonged periods of economic strife from which they are unlikely to ever emerge.

Ogdensburg isn’t on the White House’s radar. Instead, the 22,000 lucky H-2B visa recipients are, and they will come from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala – the Northern Triangle countries – as part of the Biden administration’s futile effort to offset what it labels as “the root causes of migration.”

Ninety days into the Biden administration, neither the president nor his inner circle has given the slightest indication that they’re concerned about small-town America. Their exclusive focus is on adding immigrants to the U.S. population which will make economic recovery evermore elusive for America’s embattled poor.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Despite High Unemployment, White House Invites More Foreign Workers

Biden Removes Visa Freeze, More Workers to Enter U.S.

By Joe Guzzardi

With so much media focused on the accelerating border emergency, another immigration-related development has gone largely unnoticed – President Joe Biden’s commitment to admit more employment-based visa holders into the still-tight U.S. labor market.

At the border, Biden’s team shows no interest in slowing the influx of Northern Triangle aliens who know that they can turn themselves into immigration officials, and soon be on their way into the U.S. interior. Last month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended a 20-year record high 168,000 foreign nationals, a total that included 19,000 minors. Biden deftly handed Vice President Kamala Harris the responsibility for bringing the border chaos under control. But Harris has responsibility avoidance skills equal to Biden’s.

Since being delegated the White House’s go-to border person, Harris has traveled to Middletown, Connecticut, where she explored the state’s former juvenile detention center as a possible migrant housing facility. She also traveled to Los Angeles and Chicago, but not to McAllen, Texas, a crisis point in the border fiasco. Neither Biden nor Harris have announced future plans to journey South.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., in a move that will harm already struggling U.S. workers, Biden allowed former President Donald Trump’s temporary pause on some employment visas to expire on March 31. Effective April 1, tech workers – most notably H-1Bs, F-1 visa holders that may be enrolled in Optional Practical Training work-study programs and seasonal hospitality workers – will once again be able to enter the U.S. to compete with, or displace, American workers. The Trump administration issued the ban to protect Americans’ employment opportunities for those who, because of the coronavirus-related furloughs or firings, lost their jobs.

Also on April 1, USCIS announced that the agency would no longer automatically reject incomplete asylum or immigration benefit applications even though it’s unlawful to process them. When USCIS accepts a partially blank form, it violates legal requirements in the Code of Federal Regulations. From the USCIS policy manual: “In order for USCIS to accept a benefit request, a submission must satisfy all applicable acceptance criteria.” The no-blank-space guideline was put into place in October 2019 to deter widespread immigration fraud, a safeguard the Biden administration is unconcerned about.

The following day, April 2, the State Department announced that visa hopefuls previously denied because of Trump’s freeze could reapply by submitting a new application. Visa applicants not interviewed earlier will have their applications prioritized. Similar to his practice with the developing border turmoil, Biden had no comment on his administration’s relaxed revisions.

Ending Trump’s visa pause and accepting watered-down asylum applications help prospective asylees and a wide range of industries that profit from an expanded labor pool. In addition to the asylees who will now have virtually an unobstructed path to work permission and affirmative benefits, other winners are Silicon Valley, landscapers, resort and restaurant owners, and families who hire au pairs. The Chamber of Commerce, long-time advocates for more cheap labor, and immigration lawyers also come out ahead under Biden’s more expansive and permissive immigration views. The American Immigration Lawyers Association and more than 100 trade associations and immigration advocacy groups wrote a letter to Biden which demanded that the president reverse Trump’s temporary ban. By complying, Biden is facilitating a wealth transfer from U.S. labor to U.S. industry.

Whether looked at from the border perspective or from an interior jobs market viewpoint, nothing Biden has done during his administration’s early days helps average U.S. citizens. Biden’s ending of Trump’s employment-based visa ban is hard to justify in light of his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan that he claims will, along with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, create 19 million jobs. In no sane world is it logical to import high- and low-skilled workers, as Biden has authorized, while millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and at the same time advocate for spending $4.2 trillion – the rescue and jobs bills’ total cost – to create jobs.

For a president who has long embraced the myth that he’s just “plain folk” – old Blue-Collar Joe, the working man’s friend – his actions contradict his image.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Biden Removes Visa Freeze, More Workers to Enter U.S.