Secret deal quadruples foreign workers in U.S.
Borrows from Rubio's 'Gang of Eight' bill to flood blue-collar job market
Buried in the 2,000-page omnibus spending bill released by the Senate Wednesday morning is a secret provision that many senators hope unemployed blue-collar workers won’t find out about.
This provision would quadruple the number of H-2B visas for low-skilled foreign “guest workers.” It would allow more than a quarter-of-a-million foreign workers to enter the U.S. each year and work in the construction industry, hotel-motel services, truck drivers, food processing, forestry and many other fields that don’t require a college education.
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The last-minute insert was sponsored by Sens. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C. A bipartisan group of senators opposes the bill, including Sessions, Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The bill appears to be a copy of the Save Our Small and Seasonal Business Act, or SOSSBA, according to an op-ed in National Review by immigration attorney Ian Smith.
Smith wrote:
Borrows from Rubio's 'Gang of Eight' bill to flood blue-collar job market
Buried in the 2,000-page omnibus spending bill released by the Senate Wednesday morning is a secret provision that many senators hope unemployed blue-collar workers won’t find out about.
This provision would quadruple the number of H-2B visas for low-skilled foreign “guest workers.” It would allow more than a quarter-of-a-million foreign workers to enter the U.S. each year and work in the construction industry, hotel-motel services, truck drivers, food processing, forestry and many other fields that don’t require a college education.
[clip]
The last-minute insert was sponsored by Sens. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C. A bipartisan group of senators opposes the bill, including Sessions, Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The bill appears to be a copy of the Save Our Small and Seasonal Business Act, or SOSSBA, according to an op-ed in National Review by immigration attorney Ian Smith.
Smith wrote:
“Like SOSSBA, the Mikulski-Tillis bill would exclude returning H-2B temporary workers from the normal annual cap of 66,000. Although SOSSBA was previously in place, Congress failed to renew it in 2008. The H-2B program is designed to import temporary, seasonal, non-agricultural guest workers, mostly in the areas of landscaping, forestry, hotels, seafood processing, restaurants, amusement parks, and construction. Many of these unskilled jobs traditionally go to society’s most vulnerable — including single women, the disabled, the elderly, minorities, teenagers, students, and first-generation immigrants.”