The Biden administration — yet again — has caved on another foreign worker issue: It has approved a doubling of the number of H-2B (non-skilled, non-ag) workers for the coming 12 months.
There is a congressionally set limit of 66,000 of these workers annually, but the administration has decided to add another 64,716 of them in the coming fiscal year to “meet the needs of American businesses”, declared DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on October 12. (This was authorized, but not required, by Congress.)
That this will deprive U.S. citizens and green card holders of an equal number of jobs was, predictably, not mentioned.
Most of the additional workers will come from a familiar source in this program: those who have worked for it in the past and who presumably returned home after their tours of duty. These aliens are largely from either Mexico or Jamaica. There are 44,716 of them.
The other 20,000 must be recruited either in Haiti or in the three Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, places that send us so many illegal entrants.
The U.S. tried this last year and it did, in fact, bring in large numbers of Northern Triangle aliens, but only five from Haiti, as we reported at the time.
There is no reason not to expect the same imbalance this time around.