“Guests”
Trump called asylum seekers at the southern border “animals” yesterday and yet
As President Trump threatened to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border in recent days, his Department of Homeland Security nearly doubled the number of temporary guest worker visas available this summer.
Well, that’s different. That’s cheap labor; that’s a whole other story.
DHS and the Labor Department plan to grant an additional 30,000 H-2B visas this summer on top of the 33,000 H-2B visas they had planned to give out, the agencies confirmed.
The H-2B visa is for foreign workers to come to the United States and work for several months at a company such as a landscaper, amusement park or hotel. About 80 percent of these visas went to people from Mexico and Central America last year, government data show.
Because why? Because the pay is bad. Those are the jobs that pay minimum wage (or less if the bosses can get away with it) for hard physical work, and that makes them harder to fill.
Trump says there is a national emergency at the southern border because too many people are trying to come to the United States. On Friday, he implored migrants to turn around and go home.
“We can’t take you anymore,” Trump said Friday while standing at the border in California. “Our country is full.”
But his administration is giving a different message to some short-term workers. With the additional visas, the Trump administration is on track to grant 96,000 H-2B visas this fiscal year, the most since 2007, when George W. Bush was president.
Republicans may hate immigrants but by god they love cheap labor.
EPI, a left-leaning think tank, put out research this week showing that H-2B visa workers are typically paid less than American workers who do the same jobs. For example, landscaping workers on the visa are paid an average of $12.94 an hour, more than a dollar less than the $14.28 average wage paid to U.S. workers, according to an analysis of data from the Labor Department and H-2B visa applications.
It’s ok though. They’re temporary. We can throw them out any time we feel like it, for instance if they ask for better pay.
Easy solution. Bring in the immigrants, throw out the Trumpistas.
It seems that pretty much every horrifying abuse against humanity starts with the dehumanization of the victims.
So Trump literally is bringing in more immigrants to ‘steal our jobs’, while continuing to turn his back on asylum seekers. I… I just can’t.
As a party, yes. As individuals, it’s really two different groups. The rank-and-file Republicans who comprise the bulk of the voters just hate immigrants period; they often pay lip service to “legal” versus “illegal,” but for the most part they just hate anyone who looks brown or speaks Spanish. The business community who provides the funding just loves cheap labor.
One of the reasons Trump got as much traction as he did in the GOP is that the first group was frustrated from decades of their party pretending to indulge their bigoted preferences while largely kowtowing to the money men. But as this story shows, Trump is still quietly giving business its cheap labor while throwing enough red meat to the base to shut them up.
Exactly (and he’s not the first). By “Republicans” I meant the ones in office, shielding Trump and passing fuck the workers/the poor legislation. That’s been the head-scratcher about Republican wins for decades: the way the working class votes against its own interests time after time. Not that the Dems are friends of the working class either, but as they love to remind us they’re all we’ve got. It seems that racism trumps economic interests every damn time.