Immigration 'Harmed' Citizens Can Take Action

The Laken Riley Act (LRA) does more for American citizens than protect them from violent illegal aliens. Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student murdered by a Venezuelan illegal immigrant last year. Once President Trump signs LRA, illegal aliens charged with burglary, larceny, theft, or shoplifting, as well as those who admit to committing those crimes would be subject to mandatory detention. The amended LRA version, which the House passed 263 to 156, added the assault of police officers to the list of offenses that would trigger illegal immigrants’ custody.

Buried in the legislation’s fine print is a provision which offers a path that will allow U.S. states to sue the federal government on behalf of American workers and students who have been harmed by H-1B employment visas, F-1 student visas, OPT work permits or other visas like the H-2B that might result in financial loss through job displacement. States can act against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Justice if damages exceed $100. The act gives fired IT workers, job-seeking college graduates and rejected high school seniors applying to colleges whose deans of admission pass them over in favor of international students.

The exact language from the act: “The attorney general of a State or other authorized State officers…shall have standing to bring an action against the Attorney General or Secretary of Homeland Security…For purposes of this subsection, a state or its residents shall be considered to have been harmed…including financial harm in excess of $100.” More: “The court shall advance on the docket and expedite a civil action…to the greatest extent possible.”

For maximum effectiveness, a large group of, for example, displaced IT workers should unite and present their collective cases to the state AGs, ideally in red states. As an example, in late October 2015, Disney summoned to its personnel office about 250 IT workers. Some had been performing so well that they thought the meeting’s purpose was to announce bonuses. Instead, the American workers were fired and forced to train their foreign-born, mostly Chinese and Pakistani, H-1B replacements. The dismissed IT workers were in their late 30s or early 40s with mortgages, car payments and college tuition bills to pay. Abruptly, their income had been taken from them. If, as H-1B advocates insist, the foreign replacements are the best and the brightest, they would not need training. As one former Disney employee told The New York Times, "I just couldn't believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly. It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can't grasp it."

Continuing with the hypothetical argument, in 2015 Republican Pam Bondi was Florida’s Attorney General and the governor was Republican Rick Scott, now a U.S. Senator. Had the LRA been effective in 2015, the displaced workers could have taken their legal and undeniable claim that they were “harmed” to Bondi. No one can can make an intelligent argument that employment-based temporary immigrant visas like the H-1B don’t harm U.S. workers.

H-2Bs represent another unnecessary visa that thwarts blue-collar workers in non-agricultural occupations like landscaping, forestry, hospitality and custodial services. A statutory cap of 66,000 per year does not prevent Congress, in response to donors’ pleas, from pressing for annual increases. Data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show that there were nearly 117,000 H-2B workers in 2021. Small business owners falsely allege that without more foreign-born labor, bankruptcy is inevitable. Labor statistics do not support the owners’ worker shortage exaggerations. As with most other guestworker programs, the employer of the H-2B worker owns and controls the visa. In practice, that means that the employer has significant leverage over the worker; if an H-2B worker is fired, he or she becomes instantly deportable. Daniel Costa, the Economic Policy Institute’s Immigration Law and Policy Research Director, wrote that the fraud-perpetrating H-2B employers stole $1.8 billion from its workers over the last two decades.

The majority of H-2Bs work in Florida or Texas as landscapers or groundskeepers. The suggestion that Florida or Texas has to import foreign-born gardeners is, on its face, preposterous. Florida has more than 100 colleges, universities, junior colleges, advanced religious affiliated learning institutions, and trade colleges. More than 1,250 golf courses range from Pensacola to the Florida Keys. Among the tens of thousands of students---some on an academic break, wanting to pay their tuition and, assuming a fair wage---more than enough potential landscapers or groundskeepers are available to work Florida’s golf courses, country clubs and gated housing communities.

Success on the LRA approach, if it ever arrives, would be in the future but an opportunity has unexpectedly fallen into long-time sidelined U.S. workers’ laps. Getting to the finish line will require organization, dedication and hard work, attributes that marginalized Americans have in abundance.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org