Republicans and Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee are banding together to ensure businesses can import the maximum amount of H-2B foreign visa workers to the United States to take blue-collar jobs in construction, landscaping, and other industries.
Already, businesses are allowed to import 66,000 H-2B foreign visa workers to take blue-collar, nonagricultural American jobs annually. Congress has long allowed, but not mandated, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Labor Department to allow businesses to import an additional 65,000 H-2B foreign visa workers.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, the H-2B visa program is fraught with abuse.
An amendment from Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), backed by Republicans and Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, would require DHS and the Labor Department to issue those additional 65,000 H-2B visas on top of the 66,000 allotted annually to businesses.
Reps. Mark Amodei (R-NV), Lauren Underwood (D-IL), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), and Chellie Pingree (D-ME) all spoke in favor of Harris’s amendment. Underwood, in particular, said she supported requiring the federal government to import more H-2B foreign visa workers while admitting the program is often used as a low-wage scheme where businesses can cut costs.
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) raised issues with the H-2B visa program, noting that “from 2000 to 2021, 225,000 cases were investigated by the Labor Department in the seven major H-2B industries and violations were found in 80 percent of those cases.”
“Just from 2018 to 2020, 853 H-2B visa workers were victims of labor trafficking and many of those, two-thirds of them reported threats of deportation [by employers], and nearly half of them reported they were given misinformation about the jobs they took,” Pocan continued:
Employers stole their employees’ phones, locked their employees in small trailers at night, their were women who have reported being frequently harassed and demand to see their breasts and bosses demanding to have sex with them in order to keep their jobs. This isn’t a perfect program.
Pocan also said the H-2B visa program is used to cut wages in the construction industry and suggested opposition to allowing businesses to hire foreign construction workers when there are plenty of available American construction workers for hire.
“I am just concerned about the program. I think H-2B visas in [the tourism industry] is very valid, I think in construction it’s less valid,” Pocan said. “It would be great to have that conversation.”
The move to require more H-2B foreign visa workers to join the U.S. workforce comes as the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals that nearly all job growth under President Joe Biden has gone to migrants rather than native-born Americans.
While 637,000 foreign-born workers joined the U.S. labor market in the last year, almost 300,000 native-born Americans have fallen out of the workforce. From May 2019 through May 2024, about 3.2 million migrants have been added to the U.S. labor market. At the same time, fewer than a million native-born Americans have joined the labor market.
Simultaneously, labor participation for working-class prime-age American men dropped from 95.8 percent in 1960 to 84.8 percent in 2024 with no end for such a decline in sight.
Annually, the U.S. gives green cards to about 1.2 million legal immigrants, while another 1.4 million foreign workers are admitted annually on visas to take American jobs. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are added to the labor market every year, many on work permits given to them by the federal government.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
