Burr, Tillis demand MORE foreign workers be imported into US
Having a hard time finding a job? Your allegedly Republican US senators are not doing a whole lot to help the situation:
Thirty-one Democratic and Republican Senators are asking the Department of Homeland Security to maximize the use of blue-collar outsourcing visas so U.S. companies can import more foreign workers instead of recruiting, training and paying unskilled U.S. workers.
The bipartisan request comes three months after the shocking November vote pressured GOP leaders to slash the H-2B visa program from a one-year high of 264,000 visas back down to the long-standing level of 66,000 visas.
The request to Department of Homeland Security John Kelly also comes as a claimed shortage of H-2B is prompted recruiters to find, hire, train and retain some of the millions of young underemployed men and women who could fill the many low-status seasonal jobs in landscaping, golf course maintenance, cleanup in restaurants, seafood processing, and hotel cleaning which are often allocated to H-2B contract-workers
Recruitment consultants are helping employers hire alternative workers from American trade schools and from Puerto Rico. They are also warning employers to raise salaries and benefits for U.S. workers or else lose the workers to better-paying companies. “The first thing all employees want is a decent wage … Do you pay a competitive wage? This is probably the first place to start,” one employer recently urged her fellow landscaping employers.
On March 6, North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis announced a bipartisan Senate effort to increase the supply of H-2B visas, saying;
Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Mark Warner (D-VA) and a bipartisan group of 29 other senators sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, outlining concerns that the H-2B visa statutory cap will be reached soon. The Senators requested the Department of Homeland Security to conduct an audit to determine the number of unused visas during the first half of the fiscal year, and also requested that any unused visas be provided to eligible businesses that have been unable to secure an adequate number of workers due to the cap.
According to the statement
In 2015, after previously announcing that the statutory cap had been reached, [the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency] determined that more than 5,000 unused visas were available. Soon thereafter, the agency began accepting applications from businesses still hoping to hire workers through the program. With that in mind, we respectfully request that your office conduct an immediate audit of the number of unused visas from the first half of the fiscal year and project the likely usage rate for the second half of the fiscal year … As with prior practice, any unused visas should be provided to eligible businesses that have been unable to secure an adequate number of workers due
to the cap.
The estimate of 5,000 unused visas is based on the number of approved-but-unused 2015 visas. According to the letter:
We understand that when USCIS deems the cap to be reached, it accounts for a certain number of withdrawals, denials, and revocations. It is very important, however, that as soon as it has information on the actual number of visas issued, USCIS immediately makes any unused visas available to seasonal businesses.
The political request to recycle 5,000 allocated-but-unused visas is a long fall from the industry’s successful push in 2015 to effectively quadruple the H-2B visa program from 66,000 visas to 274,000 visas. House Speaker Paul Ryan backed the expansion in December 2015. Growing public and media criticism prompted Ryan to withdrew his support in 2016, so allowing the program to drop back down to 66,000 visas per year level.
The H-2B program is the blue-collar version of the H-1B visa outsourcing program, which allows a population of roughly 650,000 lower-wage foreign university graduates to take jobs sought by young American college grads. The H-1B program gets a lot of bad publicity, partly because it threatens the peers and children of influential middle-class professionals in the computer, academic, healthcare and business sectors, who also have ready access to sympathetic journalists.
Thirty-one Senators signed the letter to outsource the extra jobs. They include 10 Democrats and 21 Republicans:
Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), John Cornyn (R-TX), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Chris Coons (D-DE), John Barrasso (R-WY), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Susan Collins (R-ME), Tom Carper (D-DE), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Patty Murray (D-WA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Angus King (I-ME), Tim Scott (R-SC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Richard Burr (R-NC), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), James Lankford (R-OK), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Thad Cochran (R-MS), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and Bob Casey (D-PA).
The signers include Sen. Graham, who has a long history of aiding H-2B employers.
Tillis is also a long-standing supporter of cheap-labor visas. When serving as Speaker of the North Carolina House in 2013, he helped employers hire illegal immigrants by overriding a veto from GOP Gov. Pat McCrory. In 2017, Tillis is also pushing business-backed plans to increase the annual inflow of foreign contract-workers and to deliver an amnesty to at least 750,000 younger illegals.
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2020 can’t get here soon enough for me. This smug, bought-and-paid-for grifter needs a spanking in the worst way.
this list is pretty much you who’s who guide to “F” rated Liberty Card scoring Republican senators at conservative review with like one or two C and B rated tossed in to the mix
We are all frustrated with Tillis, but unless we can find a decent candidate to run against him and are willing to support that candidate financially, Tillis will win again, just like Burr wins every primary and we keep getting stuck with him. It is very hard to unseat an incumbent, unless WE, THE PEOPLE get behind a candidate who will not sell us out, once they get to DC, and are willing to put our money where our mouth is.
Amen
Too hard to accomplish. Requires too many people paying constant attention to what these pols are actually doing, so that they’re mad enough to see past their fifth year conservatism and “I’m a conservative” campaign ads and vote them out.
An easier approach (still not easy, but more do-able) is to take over the NCGOP at the District level and change the rules to make these people more accountable. Get rid of primaries and award nominations by convention of party activists. Precisely the kind of thing that the NCGA House and Senate caucuses have worked to prevent by having their chosen people in charge of the NCGOP.
You are exactly right about what needs to be done. Doing it would require a degree of dedication and organization that I have not yet seen in North Carolina grassroots politics.
I cannot stand our two U.S. senators…at all.
We progressives love them. They are both friendly to President Obama’s green energy agenda, now his green energy legacy. They agree with us that polar bears matter more than people.
Thom Tillis will be our next governor. We at NCGOPe are doing all we can to make that happen.
Dan Forest? Too principled and, horrors, he actually respects the grubby peasants of the Republican grassroots instead of being told what to do by the elite.
We at NCGOPe put our thumb on the scales in the primary for our liberal buddy Richard Burr, giving him party speaking gigs and publicizing his campaign through the party internet resources, while we ignored the other primary candidates. Little Richard will be returning the favor come convention time by endorsing my sockpuppet.. . er, ahh … our NCGOPe chairman Robin Hayes.
We will be doing even more to help Thom Tillis beat Dan Forest in the 2020 primary. That is why Tillis will also be endorsing Robin Hayes. Tillis needs to keep me in power and running the party, as I do under the titular ”leadership” of Hayes. Look at what I have already done to sandbag Forest on the HB2 issue by having the party, through me, come out with a conflicting position to his, just when he is going to Texas to push that issue. As long as our crew remains in power at NCGOPe, we will sandbag Forest every chance we get and push Tillis every chance we get. You can count on that. The convention in Wilmington will be the opening shot of the 2020 primary for governor. Womack would be fair and we just cannot have that.
Actually, the district conventions will also be important. Old Joyce headed the committee that engineered my gig as ED, and we need her back again, for example.
Issues? Who cares about them. Or principles, either. It is all about power with us at the NCGOPe.