Please oppose H.R. 4916 farmworker amnesty!
H.R. 4916, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, is a terrible bill that will reward businesses that have knowingly broken U.S. immigration laws, reward illegal aliens with work permits (after a period of indentured farm servitude), and harm U.S. and legal immigrant workers by increasing the number of H-2A visas issued each year by 40,000.
Specifically, this legislation harms Americans in the following ways:
- American and legal immigrant workers currently employed in the dairy, meatpacking, food processing, and canning industries will be displaced by foreign H-2A workers once H.R. 4916 expands the H-2A program to non-seasonal, year-round occupations that have some relation to agricultural products.
- American and legal immigrant workers in every other lower-wage industry in the United States, including the construction, service, hotel, and restaurant industries will be competing for jobs with and seeing their wages suppressed by the newly amnestied aliens given work authorization by H.R. 4916.
- American and legal immigrant workers in every non-agricultural industry in the United States will be harmed because H.R. 4916 mandates the use of E-Verify to ensure a legal workforce ONLY in agriculture. That means newly arriving illegal aliens — and H.R. 4916 does nothing to reduce the illegal flow — will compete with Americans and legal workers for non-agricultural jobs where E-Verify use is not mandatory.
- American and legal immigrant workers with a high school education or less will be further harmed because H.R. 4916 creates 40,000 new green cards each year (on top of the amnesties of agricultural workers) specifically to import more permanent, lower-skilled foreign workers to take American jobs.
H.R. 4916 does not benefit American or legal immigrant workers in any way and must be stopped. I urge you to oppose this legislation when the House of Representatives votes on it.
Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA
