So far this year, employers in the United States have hired some 80,000 foreign guest workers for low-skilled nonagricultural jobs. If a bipartisan group in Congress gets its way, the number could soon rise as high as 264,000.
Employers say they need to import these workers — called H-2B workers after their visa category — because no comparable American workers are available. That claim does not stand up. When labor is scarce, unemployment falls and wages rise. But unemployment is high in all of the top H-2B fields, which include landscaping, groundskeeping, construction, hospitality and seafood processing, while wages in those fields have long been flat or declining.
Even if there were a labor shortage, the H-2B system would not be an acceptable solution. The Government Accountability Office has found that H-2B workers, who typically work for nine-month stints, have been abused; news reports support these findings. These workers are yoked to their employers. If they protest unsafe conditions, wage theft or other mistreatment, they risk dismissal, deportation and financial ruin.
Why would Congress expand the H-2B system? Because businesses that profit from cheap and subservient labor are demanding that it do so. Employers are supposed to recruit American workers before they hire H-2B workers. They are also supposed to pay guest workers the prevailing wage Americans would earn. Legal loopholes and lax enforcement have allowed them to sidestep those rules.
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One attempt at reform was short-lived. In April of last year, federal regulators issued tough new rules to monitor recruitment and ensure fair pay. The backlash was swift. Later in 2015, in riders to a budget bill, the new rule on fair pay was undone, the annual capon H-2B visas was effectively quadrupled, from 66,000, and the Labor Department was denied funds to audit employer compliance with visa and labor laws.
Budget riders normally expire at the end of a fiscal year. But lawmakers have now begun to attach last year’s H-2B riders to spending bills for next year.
All workers, American and foreign, deserve fair pay. Wages are depressed by the lack of labor law enforcement coupled with a broken immigration system that creates pools of exploitable labor, including non-immigrant guest workers under H-2B. The first step toward change is to stop the riders that are derailing H-2B reform. The next, more difficult step, is comprehensive immigration reform.
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