WASHINGTON — Even with vice presidential speculation dominating the headlines, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is quietly gearing up for what could be the next major battle in the U.S. immigration policy war.
As Politico reported last month, “Lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol are quietly launching a new effort to expand visas for low-skilled foreign workers in government funding bills — a push that could drive a deep ideological rift through both parties later this year.
“Republicans and Democrats whose home states rely on immigrant labor are lobbying top appropriators to include language in this year’s funding bills to renew controversial provisions from last year’s omnibus spending measure that effectively quadrupled the number of low-skilled worker visas.”
The low-skilled foreign worker program is referred to as the H-2B visa. Immigrants who qualify for the visa are typically housekeepers and landscapers, but the number of foreigners who are able to take advantage of the program each year is capped at 66,000. That number could balloon to over a quarter million if big business groups and their allies in congress have their way.
Politico explains:
Immigrants employed under the H-2B visa can work legally in the United States up to only 10 months at a time. But in last year’s omnibus spending bill, Congress got around the 66,000 annual cap by exempting so-called returning workers — immigrants who had used the visa in the past three fiscal years — from counting toward the limits, essentially expanding the program fourfold. That means the government could issue visas for 264,000 such temporary workers this fiscal year.
Opposition to the H-2B visa expansion has created unlikely allies, including anti-immigration conservatives, labor unions and liberal lawmakers, each of which have expressed concerns about the impact the expansion could have on American workers.
But Sessions continues to be the linchpin.
“It’s frustrating that any of the [lawmakers] would push this,” he said recently. “The program does not need to be expanded. If anything, it needs to be constricted.”
Alabama’s junior senator recently sent a letter to top Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Appropriates Committee signaling that he will launch an all-out assault to stop the H-2B visa expansion from becoming permanent.
The letter reads, in part, as follows:
Fundamentally, a cap must be a cap. Not counting H-2B workers against congressionally defined caps is misleading to the American people and it is detrimental to wages and job opportunities of American workers.
Blue-collar American workers have long endured an excess of foreign workers. Millions of foreign workers have been brought into the United States, while countless jobs have gone overseas… Millions of Americans who are currently unemployed or underemployed directly compete for the jobs that are often filled by H-2B workers: i.e. landscapers, hotel workers, loggers, construction workers, amusement and recreation attendants, waiters or waitresses.
Congress may not be able to flip a switch and correct all of the damage that has been inflicted on these hardworking men and women, but we can ensure that we do not inflict further harm upon them by adding to the labor force with cheap foreign labor.
At some point we have to choose. Do we serve special interests or do we create conditions that will allow for at least a modest rise in wages?… Now is not the time to increase labor flows.
Sessions’ fight against the low-skilled foreign labor expansion will be bolstered this year by fellow opponents Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but the behind-the-scenes lobbying by business groups is likely to continue in the coming months.
