Two organizations that deal with a wide variety of social issues have issued long, scholarly reports this month on how immigration policies have been distorted to adversely impact American workers, as well as the foreign workers concerned.
Today’s topic is a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington-based think tank, using data collected from the U.S. Department of Labor over a 21-year period, stating that $1.8 billion was stolen from workers in the industries that use the H-2B non-agricultural, temporary workers program.
In a subsequent posting, we will examine a report from Howard University that shows, once again, that the H-1B program, for skilled workers, is based on an industry-promoted myth that there is a shortage of such workers, notably in computer-related fields; the myth has supported the program’s displacement of hundreds of thousands of citizen and green card workers and the lowering of wages in a highly profitable sector of the American economy.
The EPI report, by Daniel Costa, stresses that the Biden administration has repeatedly allowed more and more foreign workers to come to the U.S. in the H-2B program while doing little or nothing to tackle the abuses in it; the Trump record was similar.
The H-2B program has a nominal 66,000 annual numerical limit on new alien workers, but in recent years the employers have managed to get the government to skirt that limit in a number of ways, such as adding a supplemental number of them, by re-defining a “returning” worker as one who could be admitted beyond the limits, or by allowing additional workers if they come from certain specific Western Hemisphere nations.
And while the government was being all too creative about the number of workers involved, it was not being equally thoughtful about making sure that the workers were not exploited.
Costa uses an interesting measure of “wage theft” to point out the flaws in the program’s management. Instead of focusing on a handful of cases in which the Labor Department actually did something about misbehaving H-2B employers, his $1.8 billion wage theft estimate is based on another metric: all of the wage violations uncovered by the Wage-Hour Division in seven industries using the H-2B program over a period of 21 years. He also has, and this must have been a chore, converted those losses to current dollars.
The seven industries, in descending order of “wage theft” totals, are: construction ($847 million) and food services, janitorial services, hotel and motel, landscaping, amusement (i.e., largely carnivals), and forestry ($10 million combined).
While these are boxcar numbers, there is another factor: The Wage-Hour Division, like the IRS and for the same reason, has been starved by conservative political forces. The last time I looked, it had only 1,000 or so investigators nationwide. That’s one staff member for every 870,000 or so workers. Had it been decently funded, Costa’s numbers would have tripled if not more.
The report’s main recommendation is that the Labor Department should create a registry of wage-hour violators and see to it that no H-2Bs are granted to those who have been found by the Wage-Hour Division to have violated the law. The length of those disbarments should be adjusted in light of the severity of the violation. This is something that should have been done decades ago.
Such a registry would keep the worst of the H-2B employers out of the system, make wage theft less common, and open jobs for U.S. workers.