The New Observer
January 1, 2016
A new investigation by the BuzzFeed news service has found that the H-2 guest worker program is directly responsible for depriving the poorest American citizens of jobs—and is being ruthlessly exploited by capitalists for short-term profit.
The BuzzFeed investigation found that “many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to deny jobs to US workers so they can hire foreigners instead,” and that it is specifically Mexicans and other Latin American workers who are imported to replace Americans in the workplace.
BuzzFeed reported that last year, thousands of American companies won permission from the Obama administration to bring a total of more than 150,000 people into the country as legal guest workers for unskilled jobs—a process known as H-2 visas.
Supposedly, the H-2 visa is to fulfill the liberal lie about getting people to do “jobs that Americans don’t want to do”—and is, of course, actively supported by Obama and all establishment figures seeking to justify the ongoing Third World invasion of America.
The lengthy BuzzFeed report, based on Labor Department records, court filings, more than 100 interviews, inspector general reports, and analyses of state and federal data, found however that “many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead.”
At the same time, the investigation continued, “companies across the country in a variety of industries have made it all but impossible for US workers to learn about job openings that they are supposed to be given first crack at.”
And, when workers do find out, they are discouraged from applying.
“And if, against all odds, Americans actually get hired, they often are treated worse and paid less than foreign workers doing the same job, in order to drive the Americans to quit.”
Even worse, BuzzFeed found, “companies often do this with the complicity of government officials, records show. State and federal authorities have allowed companies to violate the spirit—and often the letter—of the law with bogus recruitment efforts that are clearly designed to keep Americans off the payroll. And when regulators are alerted to potential problems, the response is often ineffectual.”
The lie that these are “jobs that no Americans will do” is one that is familiar to all anti-immigration activists, and is used by liberals all over the Western world to justify the ongoing Third World immigration.
However, even BuzzFeed—hardly a “right wing” news service, admits that this idea is simply untrue:
The H-2 visa was created to address shortages in the American workforce. Although labor is indeed tight in some areas—such as North Dakota, where an oil boom has driven unemployment below 3%—there is little evidence of labor shortages in many industries that use the visas. In some cases, there is even a glut of available workers.”
For example, the report revealed, landscaping companies were approved for more than 30,000 H-2 visas in the 2014 fiscal year.
Yet Daniel Costa, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, which receives some funding from unions, found that over the same period, unemployment in landscaping was more than twice as high as the national average.
“The problem with the system is that the H-2 workers who are coming in are not tied to actual, demonstrated labor shortages,” Costa said.
The guest worker program also offers numerous financial incentives. Agricultural employers are exempt from payroll and unemployment taxes on H-2 workers; nonagricultural employers do not have to provide housing, but if they do they are allowed to charge their workers rent, which is sometimes extortionate.
In addition, the investigation found that the government’s H-2 program actively helps companies find pliant foreign labor at the expense of American workers. During the last five years, for example, the number of H-2 visas has surged by more than 50 percent.
Support for this program comes from both Democrats and Republicans, and business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, which has lobbied for as many as 400,000 additional H-2 visas per year.
The BuzzFeed investigation also reveals how capitalists get around the requirements of advertising work opportunities—and in so doing ensure that American nationals never get to hear about the job openings—and the numerous other tricks they use to always give work to non-Americans so that they can pay them less.
Ironically, some of the hardest-hit workers are blacks. Many of those interviewed by BuzzFeed are black, but it does not seem to register with them that it is precisely liberals like Clinton—and the half-black Obama—who are the ones who have created these policies.
* On the last day of 2015, Obama signed an executive order giving work permits to foreign college graduates who will compete against Americans for white collar jobs, despite the large number of American graduates now stuck in lower-wage positions and struggling to pay off college debts.
The rule will also make each foreign graduate much cheaper for US employers to hire than many US-born college grads.
From 2009 to 2015, Obama allowed at least 250,000 Central American illegal immigrants into the United States to request asylum or refugee status. In 2013, Obama added roughly 2 million extra foreign workers to the economy, while roughly 4 million young Americans began looking for work.