Voter Layoff Act: GOP Legislators Push Plan To Replace Americans, Import 264,000 Foreign Workers
GOP House leaders are preparing a huge appropriations bill for a vote next week — and top GOP legislators want to include a rider that could allow employers to replace at least 100,000 blue-collar Americans with up to 264,000 foreign temporary H-2B workers.
The plan would actually cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, because the unemployed Americans workers won’t pay taxes, but would get unemployment checks and welfare aid from the taxpayers.
The GOP’s pink-slip plan would also cut the wages of many other American workers before the 2016 election. That’s because the foreign temps hold down the normal wages that Americans could otherwise negotiate in a free market for their labor.
The GOP legislators, the House appropriations committee and the GOP’s leadership would not respond to repeated requests for information about the measure. A Hill aide, however, provided Breitbart with documents indicating legislators are pushing to include it in the omnibus bill. GOP leaders plan to rush that huge spending bill through the House by the end of next week.
The complex bill is a gift to donors and businesses because it would allow them to reduce wages offered in advertised jobs, thus deterring American applicants and then justifying their requests for H-2B visa workers. It also provides a huge loophole that technically keeps the current annual cap of 66,000 H-2B workers — but excludes from the cap any H-2B workers who got an H-2B visa in the prior three years. That clever loophole would allow employers to simultaneously hire up to four years of H-2B workers, or 264,000 foreign workers.
“This bill reads like it was written by landscaping industry… it’s a wish list of everything they could possibly want,” said Ed Tuddenham, a lawyer in New York. “The steel industry doesn’t get low-wage labor to compete with foreign steelmakers,” he scoffed.
The bill is being pushed by the H-2B Workforce Coalition, which includes hotel owners, golf courses, landscaping companies, realtors, the National Federation of Independent Business, building contractors, roofing companies, the racetrack association and many other groups. “Failure to enact a returning worker exemption will decimate seasonal businesses across the country,” the group claimed in a May letter, which also includes a 20-page list of companies looking to hire foreign workers instead of American workers.
The group declined to comment for this article.
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This business-first policy is also echoed by the GOP’s new House Speaker, Rep. Paul Ryan, who has endorsed the “any willing worker” claim that U.S.-based executives should be allowed to offer any job to any foreign workers if Americans workers won’t take the job at an advertised wage. “We want to have a system where people can come here and work– go back and forth if they want to,” Ryan said in 2013.
In fact, Ryan endorses the H-2B worker program on his website. “Employers should be able to hire workers on a temporary or seasonal basis when they can’t find Americans to fill the jobs. Wisconsin, for instance, relies on seasonal labor for agriculture and other industries, but due to a lack of seasonal H-2B visas, some Wisconsin businesses face annual labor shortfalls. If we can link legal immigrants with small businesses, we can help spur economic growth.”
In Oct. 2015, only 62.4 percent of adult Americans had jobs. That’s down from 66.9 percent in April 2001, and level with the June 1977 level.
