GOP Swamp Alligators Are Busy Undermining U.S. Workers

From an unlikely place, deep red Kansas, comes a plot to completely gut immigration enforcement, and add to the illegal immigrant cheap labor work force. In 2016, President Trump carried Kansas by more than 20 points. Nevertheless, Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder, from Kansas’ 3rd District, joined North Carolina Democrat David Price and other anti-enforcement representatives to pass amendments worthy of any open borders fanatic. Yoder’s amendment, and similar poisonous ones, are attached to a must-pass Department of Homeland Security funding bill.

Price’s proposed measure, about which Yoder spoke enthusiastically, would prevent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from carrying out Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recent asylum eligibility ruling. Last month, Sessions announced that domestic abuse and gang violence no longer qualify for asylum as the 1980 Refugee Act defines it. Although asylum petitioners’ abuse and violence claims are hearsay, the previous administration accepted them as gospel. Allowing in the hundreds of thousands of coached asylum petitioners would eventually result in lost sovereignty, endless chain migration and unsustainable population growth.

Since Sessions’ new guidelines went into effect, they’ve been successful. According to a story in The New York Times, asylum denials in some sectors are at record highs. If Price and Yoder prevail, efforts to stop asylum claimants at the border would be scuttled. Preceding years of catch and release that Price and Yoder want to restore led to a huge influx of Central Americans.

Yoder, hellbent on creating more wreckage, introduced his Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act, HR 392, which seeks to eliminate per-country caps that establish a ceiling for citizens from individual countries. Critics view removing country caps as a not-so-thinly veiled attempt to import more low wage H-1B visa workers, predominantly Indian nationals.

Yet another House Republican, Washington Rep. Dan Newhouse introduced an amendment that would allow the H-2A agricultural guest worker visa to be used for year-round workers.

Currently, the visa is limited to temporary or seasonal agricultural workers. The Newhouse change would extend the already unlimited number of H-2A visas issued each year to include dairy farmers.

Finally, the amendment by Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) would permanently exempt returning workers from being counted against the annual 66,000 H-2B cap. Employers use the H-2B visa to hire low-skilled or temporary landscaping, hospitality and seafood processing foreign workers. Harris’ amendment could quadruple the H-2B annual allotment.

The amendments subject vulnerable under-employed Americans to more job competition from employment-based visa holders, a victory for the relentless pro-immigration lobbyists, but a defeat for struggling working Americans across industries.

In his August 7 letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Peter Kirsanow excoriated Yoder, and predicted that the major illegal immigration increases sure to follow will harm all Americans, especially blacks.

Kirsanow wrote that illegal immigration, and high legal immigration levels, have been largely responsible for the declining employment prospects and wages of low-skilled Americans generally, and black men in particular. Collectively, the amendments endanger the 3.9 percent unemployment rate, the 6.5 percent black unemployment rate, and the 2.8 percent wage and benefits gain, the decade’s largest.

Appropriations committee chair Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) allowed the amendments to pass on spineless voice votes, the apex of political cowardice. The full Congress didn’t debate the amendments or allow for public comment, the time-honored process for creating legal immigration laws. After the bill passed along party lines, 29-22, committee members skedaddled out of town to begin their undeserved vacations.

Not all is lost, however. The House Rules Committee can strip the amendments. Even if they slip through, a full House vote awaits, as well as a Senate-House conference and President Trump’s veto pen. But Yoder and the other Republicans have revealed themselves to their constituents as the dupes of special interest groups.

Still, the committee’s shameless anti-American worker, anti-sovereignty actions leave a nasty aftertaste among voters who hope for better, but are rarely rewarded.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.