#ncsen: Thillis keeps delivering for his big donors

There’s a nasty surprise hiding in appropriations legislation thom-smokingcurrently on the Hill, and I think we have Thom The Therrible to — in part — thank for it:

GOP House leaders are preparing a huge appropriations bill for a vote next week — and top GOP legislators want to include a rider that could allow employers to replace at least 100,000 blue-collar Americans with up to 264,000 foreign temporary H-2B workers.

The plan would actually cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, because the unemployed Americans workers won’t pay taxes, but would get unemployment checks and welfare aid from the taxpayers.

The GOP’s pink-slip plan would also cut the wages of many other American workers before the 2016 election. That’s because the foreign temps hold down the normal wages that Americans could otherwise negotiate in a free market for their labor.

The GOP legislators, the House appropriations committee anRepublican Candidate For Senate Thom Tillis Attends His Election Night Gatheringd the GOP’s leadership would not respond to repeated requests for information about the measure. A Hill aide, however, provided Breitbart with documents indicating legislators are pushing to include it in the omnibus bill. GOP leaders plan to rush that huge spending bill through the House by the end of next week.

The complex bill is a gift to donors and businesses because it would allow them to reduce wages offered in advertised jobs, thus deterring American applicants and then justifying their requests for H-2B visa workers. It also provides a huge loophole that technically keeps the current annual cap of 66,000 H-2B workers — but excludes from the cap any H-2B workers who got an H-2B visa in the prior three years. That clever loophole would allow employers to simultaneously hire up to four years of H-2B workers, or 264,000 foreign workers.

“This bill reads like it was written by the landscaping industry… it’s a wish list of everything they could possibly want,” said Ed Tuddenham, a lawyer in New York. “The steel industry doesn’t get low-wage labor to compete with foreign steelmakers,” he scoffed.

The bill is being pushed by the H-2B Workforce Coalition, which includes hotel owners, golf courses, landscaping companies, realtors, the National Federation of Independent Business, building contractors, roofing companies, the racetrack wallassociation and many other groups. “Failure to enact a returning worker exemption will decimate seasonal businesses across the country,” the group claimed in a May letter, which also includes a 20-page list of companies looking to hire foreign workers instead of American workers.

[…]In the Senate, the measure is being pushed by two new GOP Senators — North Carolina Republican Sen. Tom Tillis and Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA). The Senators’ offices did not respond. […]

Soak all that in and consider it in connection with THIS FACT:  There are over 94.6 MILLION Americans who can’t find work or who have given up on finding work.  THAT is a record high.  And these guys want to make it easier to import cheap labor.