See also: Giorgia Meloni Betrays Italian Workers Over Legal Immigration
I have two samples of bad news about immigration, in two separate posts. (The other is linked above.)
The worse of the two, although I'm sorry to say the less surprising, is that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have shafted working- and middle-class Americans yet again. It's what they live for, I think.
The Department of Homeland Security, the DHS, of course needs to have its operations funded for the coming fiscal year, the one that starts on October 1st, and it is up to Congress to approve that funding.
The House Appropriations Committee, 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats, duly did so before the July 4th recess. They budgeted 91½ billion dollars to fund DHS the next fiscal year.
That, however, was only part of the bill they passed. In there along with the funding, the Committee—with its Republican majority of seven, remember—also authorized major changes to the system of working visas for foreigners.
It's gonna be a BIG DAY when American farmers learn about robots.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 11, 2023
House Republicans approve bill allowing the agricultural sector to import MORE foreign workers and no longer requires the jobs to be seasonal.https://t.co/XbCFqCL3Dd
The H-2A visa, for example, which is intended to let farmers import agricultural labor, gets expanded so that the jobs for those laborers no longer have to be seasonal or temporary.
Similarly with the H-2B visa, the non-agricultural equivalent of the H-2A, notoriously used by American employers as a source of cheap blue-collar labor. This latest bill expands the number of H-2B visas, with at least 200,000 additional foreign workers joining our labor market on H-2B visas.
It's not clear why these expansions were included in the bill. Even the Heritage Foundation, which generally sides with the Uniparty on immigration issues, sniffed at them.
Such substantive changes to legal immigration programs should be debated and voted on in the authorizing committees, not snuck into an appropriations bill.
