Dirty Work: In-Sourcing American Jobs with H-2B Guestworkers

[HiPointDem]

Americans don’t want to mow your lawn. They don’t want to serve you your lobster roll sandwich during your summer holiday in Maine. They won’t drive the trucks that bring food to the grocery store you shop in, or chop down the trees that produce the paper you use, or perform at the circus you attend every summer....American workers have grown soft, young people don’t want to work, and the unemployed don’t want to do much of anything strenuous these days.

These are the kind of flawed assumptions that have led to the creation and rapid growth of the H-2B visa program, which has resulted in more half a million jobs being filled by foreign guestworkers over the last five years, rather than Americans and immigrants already in the United States. Despite the significant impact that the H-2B visa program has on American workers, the program receives scant media coverage compared to other guestworker categories...The goal of this report is to shed light on the poor conditions that H-2B guestworkers often toil in; to expose the damage that this program does to the most vulnerable sector of American workers: the poorly educated, students, minorities, and legal immigrants; to examine the recruiters who find workers and the employers who hire them; and to scrutinize the government’s role in sanctioning and managing the H-2B bureaucracy.

Use of the H-2B program has morphed from its original intent to help employers that need seasonal and/or temporary workers. The majority of the program’s current users are neither small nor seasonal employers, but rather mid- to large-sized companies and recruiters that petition for H-2Bs to work for 10 months out of the year, year after year.

We examine Sen. Mikulski’s recent campaign contributions here because she has been the public face and most vocal cheerleader for the H-2B program, but, in fairness, she is far from being the only politician feeding at the H-2B employer trough. There’s plenty of blame to go around, as evidenced by the current bipartisan push to renew SOSSBA, which currently has 37 co-sponsors in the Senate, 21 Democrats and 16 Republicans.9 The House has a similar bill introduced by Rep. Frank Kratovil Jr. (D-Md.), which currently has 24 co-sponsors, including 12 Democrats and 12 Republicans.10




http://www.cis.org/h-2b-guestworkers

[Xipe Totec]

1. H2-B Visas are legalized slavery

H2-B visas are not held by the "guest workers" they are held by the employers and cover a certain number of "heads". There are no names attached to these visas.

Any foreign guest worker can instantly become an "illegal alien" simply by pissing off his boss and getting fired.

And just like magic, a different "illegal alien" can become a legal guest worker by taking that very same vacated job.

And while we wail and gnash our teeth at these so called illegal aliens, these legalizes slave owners laugh all the way to the bank.