Members of Congress have used past spending bills to increase H-2B visas or to authorize DHS to increase H-2B visas. Please oppose any attempt at doing this in the upcoming spending bill.
The H-2B program often abused. A recent BuzzFeed expose highlights the misuse of the H-2B program:
“By its own admission, the Labor Department very frequently finds problems with guest workers’ labor conditions. In the 2014 fiscal year, it identified violations in 82% of the H-2 visa cases it investigated. Yet federal records show that the department bans — or to use its term, debars — very few companies, and in at least one year didn’t debar a single one in the entire country. Between 2010 and 2014, agency investigators identified nearly 1,000 companies that had violated H-2 laws, yet in that time period, the Labor Department debarred fewer than 150. Twelve employers were found to have each stolen more than $100,000 from their guest workers in that time period; only one was debarred …
“Repeated government audits have found that the Labor Department suffers from an ‘inability to consider debarment’ for the most serious violators. Records and interviews show that the agency has blocked its own staffers from even trying to find out whether companies are breaking the law, and that sometimes it ignores its own investigators when they suggest that abusive employers be debarred.”
Increasing H-2B numbers is bad policy and bad for vulnerable American workers. Please do all you can to ensure the program isn’t expanded in any upcoming spending bill.
Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA
