Thread: New immigration battle for Sessions

By Seung Min Kim
05/16/16 05:18 AM EDT


Sen. Jeff Sessions is keeping up his fight against the growth of H-2B visas. | AP Photo

The Senate’s toughest immigration critic is teeing up his latest battle: fighting visas for low-skilled foreign workers.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is sending a letter to top Senate appropriators, urging them to reject a quiet yet active push to expand the number of visas available for low-skilled foreign workers in government funding bills.

Sessions was irate after the omnibus bill that hastily passed Congress in December included a provision that would essentially quadruple the number of H-2B visas available. The letter, obtained by POLITICO, is an early marker from Sessions against doing so again in this year’s government funding bills.

“It is my understanding that certain members of the Senate seek to make this ‘returning worker’ exemption permanent,” Sessions wrote in the letter, addressed to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the panel’s top Democrat. “Doing so would be a grave error. Fundamentally, a cap must be a cap.”

Immigrants with an H-2B visa — for instance, landscapers, housekeepers and seafood processors — can work legally in the United States no longer than 10 months at a time before they have to return to their home countries. The total number of visas is capped at 66,000 per year.

But last year’s omnibus spending bill exempted so-called returning workers — immigrants who had used the visa in the past three fiscal years — from counting toward the limit, essentially expanding the program fourfold. That means the government could issue visas for 264,000 such temporary workers this fiscal year.

The actual impact, however, is not yet clear. Last December, the Congressional Budget Office wrote in a letter to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that the H-2B provision would boost the number of workers in the United States by just 8,000 this year.

Sessions, however, believes the impact is far broader.

“Congress may not be able to flip a switch and correct all of the damage that has been inflicted on these hard-working men and women,” Sessions wrote in the letter, referring to low-skilled American workers. “But we can ensure that we do not inflict further harm upon them by adding to the labor force with cheap foreign labor.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/0...gration-223201

He is always correct & dutiful; would like to see a large group of politicians backing him on the many things he has proposed. He makes sensible amendments, proposals and they are denied or go nowhere - he needs a group of voices.