Speaker Paul Ryan and 31 US Senators Push for Foreign Workers Over Americans

While Speaker Paul Ryan is a terrific improvement over Nancy Pelosi, his willingness to depart at times from free-market economics is troubling. Maybe he doesn’t really believe in the power of freedom in economics as a force for building the nation’s wealth. Or maybe he doesn’t think it can be sold to Americans. In any event, he’s no Ron Paul when it comes to the economic policies he supports.

Mr. Ryan’s proposals for foreign workers are going to run headlong into President Trump’s emphasis that we, “Buy American, Hire American.” He’s even gone so far as to suggest that American companies cannot function without foreign workers.

But Paul Ryan is not the only Republican who gets things wrong. Several Republican senators have joined with Democrat colleagues to push for more foreign workers in US businesses.

Thirty-one Democratic and Republican Senators are asking the Department of Homeland Security to maximize the use of blue-collar outsourcing visas so U.S. companies can import more foreign workers instead of recruiting, training and paying unskilled U.S. workers.

The bipartisan request comes three months after the shocking November vote pressured GOP leaders to slash the H-2B visa program from a one-year high of 264,000 visas back down to the long-standing level of 66,000 visas.

The request to Department of Homeland Security John Kelly also comes as a claimed shortage of H-2B is prompted recruiters to find, hire, train and retain some of the millions of young underemployed men and women who could fill the many low-status seasonal jobs in landscaping, golf course maintenance, cleanup in restaurants, seafood processing, and hotel cleaning which are often allocated to H-2B contract-workers.

There are both H-2B visas and H-1B visas. For those who are not sure what this is about, here’s a summary.

The H-2B program is the blue-collar version of the H-1B visa outsourcing program, which allows a population of roughly 650,000 lower-wage foreign university graduates to take jobs sought by young American college grads. The H-1B program gets a lot of bad publicity, partly because it threatens the peers and children of influential middle-class professionals in the computer, academic, healthcare and business sectors, who also have ready access to sympathetic journalists.

As for the impact of the importation of foreign workers into the US, it’s nothing to be proud of.

The federal government annually imports two new temporary or permanent foreign workers for every four young Americans who turn 18, which helps push millions of working-age American men and women out of the formal workforce. The flood of foreign labor also pushes many marginal U.S. workers toward social alienation, drug dependence, and death, and annually shifts roughly $500 billion from employees’ wallets to employers’ income. In November, Donald Trump won the presidency with a campaign to “Buy American, Hire American.”

Hire Americans? Or important foreign workers to perform unskilled labor for lower wages and fewer benefits? We shall soon see which side the federal bureaucracy takes.

Source: Breitbart