House Republicans are expected to approve a gigantic “H-2C”
guest-worker bill on Wednesday that allows the nation’s food industry to employ
one million low-wage, foreign guest-workers — regardless of how many Americans
would lose their skilled or unskilled jobs in fields, orchards, cattle ranches,
dairy farms, forests, seafood ports, meat-packing plants, and food processing
factories.
The huge wave of
outsourcing “guest workers” would displace and cut wages for a huge number of
blue-collar Americans, and also would slash incentives for agriculture
companies to develop and manufacture European-style high-tech labor-saving gear,
such as robotic cow-milkers, fruit pickers, and meat cutters.
The H-2C
bill is authored by Rep. Robert Goodlatte, the chairman of the
House Judiciary Committee, whose members will vote Wednesday
for the bill. His Virginia district includes several turkey and chicken
processing plants which employ many low-wage migrants and new refugees.
The H-2C guest-workers
would be cheaper than Americans because they would be paid a little
above minimum wage. Also, they would not get housing or transport costs, the
Earned Income Tax Credit, or even a guarantee of full-time work, according to
the bill.
The
guest-worker bill may also deliver cheap replacement workers to urban
restaurants because it includes employees who process food “for further
distribution.” That term is broad enough to include urban workers who prepare
and package bulk food for use in restaurant chains which serve fast food
or sandwiches.
The proposed H-2C
program is a logical expansion of the federal government’s longstanding
business-first, cheap-labor national economic strategy. The cheap-labor
policies allow millions of foreign workers to cross the borderline into the
union of the 50 states to drive down costs and to boost stock values. The
migrants include roughly 8 million employed illegal immigrants, millions of “EAD” workers, unemployed refugees,
plus the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, L, J-1 and other guest-worker programs, plus the
annual inflow of 1 million legal immigrants who serve as both workers and
consumers.
The total
annual inflow of foreign workers is at least 3 million, helping to lower wages
for the 4 million young Americans who join the labor force each year. This
bipartisan economic policy was rejected in the 2016 election when Americans
picked an outsider — President Donald Trump — to help reform the nation’s
cheap-labor rules.
The H-2C program would also
complete a century-long trend in the meat-packing industry, where the left-wing
media — such as author Upton
Sinclair — helped create many urban, high-paying, unionized
meatpacking jobs. Since the 1970s, and amid the ideological shift of the media
from economic priorities to progressive social-issue priorities, the
meatpacking industry has rapidly converted the well-paid urban meatpacking jobs
into low-wage, temporary, rural jobs for many illegals, refugees, and
guest-workers.
However, a majority of
workers in the meat-processing, and roughly half
of farm workers— were still native-born Americans, according to a
2009 report.
All farm workers would be Americans or legal immigrants if the employment laws
were enforced — but industry pressure on politicians has blocked enforcement
for decades.
Democrats
are likely to oppose the H-2C bill because it mistreats employees — but
also because it provides only 10,000 green cards per year to the agriculture
workers, said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration
Studies. If the H-2C farm-worker bill is combined with an amnesty and include
more green cards, Democrats may fully support the exploitation bill, he
predicted.
The H-2C bill would likely
get some support in the Senate, where business-first GOP Sen. Ron Johnson has
drafted a bill that would provide annually work-permits to 500,000 more foreign workers, plus their families.
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Goodlatte said in an
October 2 statement:
For far too
long, the broken H-2A guestworker program has buried American farmers in red
tape and excessive costs without delivering access to a stable and reliable
workforce. It’s clear that the current program is outdated and broken for
American farmers, and it’s well past the time to replace it with a reliable,
efficient, and fair program that provides American farmers access to a legal,
stable supply of workers, both in the short- and long-term, for seasonal as
well as year-round work.
The bill is
designed to provide the food industry with many cheap workers — while also
preventing those imported workers from becoming U.S. citizens, or from having
children born in the United States. That worker-to-citizen process has proved
deadly for the Republican Party in Democratic-run California but also in
Goodlatte’s home state of Virginia, where a large number of immigrants has
turned the one GOP state into a Democratic-leaning state.
The GOP effort to deny
citizenship to government-dependent foreign workers is anathema to the
Democratic Party, which has gained millions of voters — plus political control
of California — as millions of former illegal-immigrant farm workers have
gradually gotten citizenship for themselves or their U.S.-born children. “I don’t see the
Democrats being able to support that bill … [because it ensures] quasi-serfdom,” said Mark Krikorian,
director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
For both cynical and good
reasons, they don’t want the [guest workers] to
be indentured serfs to a tied to a job — which they really are —
and at the same time, they want to make them citizens so they vote
for Democrats
The massive importation of
wage-cutting workers is anathema to pro-American immigration reformers, such as
Krikorian. They are trying to cut the supply of foreign workers so that
Americans wages can finally rise above their 1973 levels.
To win the support of
pro-American reformers and voters, Goodlatte’s bill is being packaged with
a popular bill that
would require companies to verify that new hires can legally work in the United
States. That is a top priority for immigration reforms groups because it would
reduce the iring of illegal immigrants and force up wages for Americans.
The “E-verify” bill was developed by Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, and it titled
the Legal
Workforce Act.
“Nearly 20 million
Americans are unemployed or underemployed,” Smith said in a statement.
“Meanwhile, seven million people are working in the United States illegally. By
expanding the E-Verify system to all U.S. employers, this bill will ensure that
jobs only go to legal workers.” Smith is also pushing for passage of a bill
that would raise
Americans’ wages by reducing the labor supply of unskilled
immigrant workers.
Goodlatte’s bill was
developed in cooperation with the agriculture industry, which is now
complaining that a labor shortage – despite the employment of roughly
500,000 illegals — is forcing it to raise wages for
Americans, to change agricultural techniques and to buy labor-saving
machinery. The agriculture industry now employs roughly 1 million farm
workers, half of whom are American. According to the Los Angeles Times:
Not
surprisingly, wages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to 2015 — a
higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis
of Labor Department data.
The tight labor market in
agriculture is forcing up wages — and is cutting profits for
investors. The S&P GSCI Agriculture Index shows that the stock
value of major U.S. agriculture companies has dropped by roughly
40 percent since 2012.
The bill
would allow agriculture companies to import 500,000 new workers each
year, under the supervision of the business-first Department of
Agriculture, and it would grow the cap 10 percent whenever the food industry
runs out of H-2C workers.
Skilled
H-2C workers can stay for three years, and unskilled H-2C workers could stay
for 18 months. Both categories could return to work after a 45-day visit home.
Those long residency periods would provide the industry with a resident population
of roughly 1 million foreign workers.
Those long
residency periods would provide the industry with a resident population of
roughly 1 million foreign workers. Initially, the roughly 500,000 illegal
immigrants now employed by the industry could be hired while also being
exempted from the 500,000 cap. Also, workers hired under the H-2A guest-worker
programs — at least 160,000 in 2017 — would also be given H02C permits but
would be exempt from the 500,000 cap.
If the H-2C
workers walk off the job to find illegal but better-paid employment in towns
and cities, the farm companies can import replacement H-2BC workers. The
legislation says:
‘(2)
REPLACEMENT OF ALIENS.—An employer may designate eligible aliens to replace
H–2C workers who abandon employment notwithstanding the
numerical limitation found in section 214(g)(1)(C).
The bill
includes minimal protections for American and H-2C workers. For example, farm
companies are supposed to advertise jobs so that American workers can
apply — but few Americans will apply once the wages drop to levels set by the
federal government.
Also,
agriculture companies can keep their imported H-2C workers idle and unpaid for
up to 50 percent of the time they are in the United States. Those workers can
complain but must hire their own lawyers and comply with the judgment of an
arbitration process. When farm companies cheat H-2C workers of wages, the
federal government can enforce proper payments, but the bill does not describe
any punishments for companies that try to cheat their imported workers.
Federal
inspectors would not be allowed to make surprise visits to the worksites where
H-2C workers are employed, the bill says.
‘COMPLIANCE
WITH BIO-SECURITY PROTOCOLS.—Except in the case of an imminent threat to health
or safety, any personnel from a Federal agency or Federal grantee seeking to
determine the compliance of an employer with the requirements of this section
or section 218B shall, when visiting such employer’s place of employment, make
their presence known to the employer and sign-in in accordance with reasonable
bio-security protocols before proceeding to any other area of the place of
employment.
The
legislation also offers green cards to 10,000 H-2C guest workers per year,
under existing “extraordinary ability” immigration laws, which provide
residency to persons who have:
extraordinary
ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics which has been
demonstrated by sustained national or international acclaim or, with regard to
motion picture and television productions a demonstrated record of
extraordinary achievement, and whose achievements have been recognized in the
field through extensive documentation, and seeks to enter the United States to
continue work in the area of extraordinary ability.
In the H-2C
bill becomes law, the resulting flood of cheap and exploitable workers would
drop labor prices to minimum-wage levels and would end the growing pressure for
automation on farms in California, Wisconsin, Washington State, Maine, Vermont
and Oregon and other states. This cheap-labor would leave U.S. farmers falling
further behind their rivals in Europe and South America, where companies are
using modern management techniques to beat American competitors.
For example,
this 2012 video shows cheap-labor being used to harvest onions in Vidalia,
Georgia.
This video
shows a U.K. farmer using three different machines to harvest onions without
imported labor:
U.S. farms are also falling
behind in the use of robots. In Chile, for example, one farming company has
bought 64 European-designed cow-milking robots for
4,500 cows. In contrast, the biggest U.S. buyer of farm-robots is a farm in Michigan
which has bought only
24 cow-milking robots.
Similarly,
Asian agricultural companies are building automated urban, non-polluting
glasshouse-farms, close to their workforces and their customers. Some U.S.
companies are building similar “vertical farms” in urban factory buildings, so
helping raise wages for urban workers.
The agriculture industry is
backing the H-2C gueset-worker bill — but want it to be even larger. An October
2 statement from
the American Farm Bureau Federation said:
Every year,
farmers and ranchers face greater challenges in finding enough workers to keep
their businesses running. The labor shortage on America’s farms and ranches is
growing, and the lack of a stable, legal supply of workers places the health of
too many farms at risk. We cannot afford to see any more of our nation’s food
supply lost in the fields.
“The Ag
Act’s proposed guest worker visa program would bring much needed improvements
to the current system while addressing the needs of our current workforce and
providing a streamlined visa process for skilled, agricultural workers in the
future. Although Farm Bureau members have concerns on certain points, such as
capping the number of visas, we stand ready to work with Chairman Goodlatte and
members of Congress to refine these provisions for the good of all U.S.
agriculture.
A statement
from the National Pork Producers Council said in a statement:
“The U.S.
pork industry is suffering from a serious labor shortage,” said NPPC President
Ken Maschhoff, a pork producer from Carlyle, Ill. “We commend Congressman
Goodlatte for sponsoring this important legislation, which allows undocumented
workers already in the United States to continue working in vital agriculture
jobs.”
“The U.S.
pork industry needs a viable agriculture workforce to remain globally
competitive,” Maschhoff said. “The current visa programs are not working for
pork producers or for the broader agriculture community. The Goodlatte bill
will rectify this.”
Four
million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free
market.
But business groups have
used their political power to tilt the labor market in their favor, via
the federal policy of importing 1 million consumers and workers each
year. The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term
work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT
permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for
foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA
illegals. Universities employ roughly 100,000 foreign
guest workers.
That Washington-imposed
economic policy of mass-immigration floods the
market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street
values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It
also drives up real estate prices, widens
wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment,
increases state and local tax burdens,
hurts kids’
schools and college education,
pushes Americans away from high-tech careers,
and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and
their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
The cheap-labor policy has
also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the
coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent
of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000,
according to a new report by the Economic
Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had
fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade
period of massive cheap-labor immigration.
Americans tell pollsters that
they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most
Americans also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with
illegals.
Because of the successful
cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and
a growing percentage of the nation’s annual income is shifting to investors and
away from employees. The business-funded Hamilton
Project suggests that the shift is transferring $1 trillion per
year from 160 million employees to the nation’s investors.
