This week, Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) in the House and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) in the Senate introduced legislation to increase the number of H-2B workers accepted in the U.S. each year. Rep. Chabot’s bill H.R. 3918 and Sen. Tillis’ bill S.2225 would allow those workers who have been approved to work in the U.S. under the H-2B visa to return in a three year period and not count against that year's H-2B cap. While Congress discusses the H-2B visa, high tech companies continue to push to increase H-1B visas that have helped many companies displace thousands of American workers.
NumbersUSA sent the following notice to all Members of Congress:
NumbersUSA will Score Any Attempt to Increase Foreign Workers
Having experienced the chaos of the end-of-the-year appropriations process, NumbersUSA wants to make clear from the outset that we will score against any effort to attach to a funding bill an increase in foreign workers, whether permanent or temporary, high-skilled or low-skilled. It would be inexcusable for Congress to force the 15 million Americans who currently are unable to find full-time work to compete with even more foreign workers for scarce jobs and ever-shrinking wages.
With companies like Disney, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and others laying off thousands of highly skilled American workers, there certainly is no need to increase the number of either temporary (H-1B) or permanent (employment-based) foreign workers in STEM fields. At the other end of the economy, only 43 percent of Americans without a high school diploma were actually employed as of the second quarter of 2015. Increasing the number of low-skilled H-2B workers will only put more of those Americans out of work and undercut the meager pay they take home.
Vote NO on any proposal to increase H-1B or permanent high-skilled foreign workers.
Vote NO on any proposal to increase H-2B low-skilled foreign workers.
