Guest Post by Joe Guzzardi
Every time an immigration conflict appears on the horizon, expansionists press for one of two solutions: amnesty or broader guest worker programs. Most often the push for more comes from Beltway lobbyists, but often the pressure emanates from within the sitting administration’s cabinet members. George W. Bush’s confidant and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a good example.
Today, President Trump has his immigration nemesis in Labor Secretary Sonny Perdue. At the recent convention for the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture in Albuquerque, Perdue said that an expanded federal guest worker program with a year-round valid H-2A visa for non-ag would go a long way toward solving the nation’s immigration problems. But that would spell potential danger ahead. Non-ag is a huge category that would open the door for ag workers to secure higher paying construction and manufacturing jobs that citizens and lawful residents should hold.
Perdue proceeded to defend his theory with grossly misleading and borderline preposterous claims. According to Perdue, most Central American ag workers have no desire to become U.S. citizens, but rather just want to “come and go” to support their families. But Perdue’s simplistic and uninformed analysis conflicts directly with what has been an increasingly steady and growing influx of Central American asylum seekers who,
specifically, hope to be granted lawful permanent residency and ultimately citizenship.
An established immigration waffler, Perdue’s guest worker enthusiasm is unsurprising. As Georgia’s governor, Perdue was recognized as tough on immigration and signed bills that reflected his enforcement perspective. But just before Perdue left office in 2010, his attitude softened, especially toward migrant farm labor.
The last thing U.S. workers need is another guest worker program, most notably one that would further reduce low-skilled laborers’ employment chances. To begin with, but apparently unbeknownst to secretary Perdue whose department must certify the labor applications, a program already exists that offers growers the opportunity to import as many cheap labor workers as they need.
The temporary, nonimmigrant H-2A visa, designed exclusively for ag and intended to cover work periods that don’t exceed one year, grants the workers up to three years to stay in the U.S. before they must return home. A 2017 study found that during that period, the laborers were paid less than half the national average wage. Not surprisingly given the overhead savings the H-2A represents, growers’ reliance on it has increased dramatically during the last decade.
Like most employment-based visas, the H-2A has been riddled with fraud. The Labor Department pledged to work aggressively to eliminate abuses. But such promises are standard and generally meaningless. Moreover, for the most part, H-2A workers pick three crops: blueberries, apples and tobacco. But mechanical blueberry harvesting is a grower option that is proven to be time-efficient and labor saving. Ditto for apples; robotic tobacco picking is still in development.
There are other advantages machines offer to growers. They can operate 24/7 and will dependably be around season after season. From immigration skeptics’ perspective, machines won’t be separated from their families, file asylum claims or petition their family members to join them in the U.S.
The message that Perdue should be delivering to his audience enamored of cheap labor is that the time has come for them to enter the 21stcentury ag world and adopt mechanization, now heavily relied on worldwide.
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We should increase our exports by exporting more illegal aliens.
I don’t understand these articles where the author can seem to figure out Trump is the one hiring all these clowns.
“Today, President Trump has his immigration nemesis in Labor Secretary Sonny Perdue”. How the fuck does he get to say Trump’s own appointee that he can fire at any time is a “nemesis”.
JFC.
Trump really knows how t0 drain the swamp.
Perdue, the first Republican governor of Georgia in over 150 years, is a nothing more than a sleazy, corrupt bankster controlled worm and among other nefarious actives whilst Malfeasance-n-Chief of Georgia was also directly responsible for the massive mortgage meltdown that led to the 2008 taxpayer anal rape commonly referred to by government and media weasels alike as a ” bail out ” of over-leveraged banks.
Yes, it all began in Georgia, where acres of plumbing pipes protruding through gray slabs of concrete still sit in overgrown developments awaiting someone to declare ownership and interest.
Once a scalawag , always a scalawag.
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The bankers’ tale
https://www.rockdalenewtoncitizen.com/news/bill-shipp—the-bankers-tale/article_65bd19b1-8bce-5e08-8e3e-7fa6214f290c.html
Gov. Roy Barnes drove one of the last nails into his political coffin in 2002. He forced passage of a law to rein in predatory lenders gone wild. Lobbyists for lenders were stunned at the way they were run over by Barnes, but they swore to get even.
The law didn’t remain intact but a year. Gov. Sonny Perdue and his Republicans trashed it as one of their premier acts after taking over. A goodly number of turncoat Democrats, elected on pro-consumer platforms, joined in the crusade to restore predatory lending to its former unregulated vigor. After all, it had been one of the state’s most profitable industries.
A lot has happened since Barnes took a poke at the predators.
In the legislative session of 2003, banking lobbyists warned that the Barnes law was so restrictive that it would shut down the mortgage business in Georgia. No one (meaning Wall Street) would buy such encumbered loans, moaned Georgia’s alarmed lenders.
Sen. Bill Stephens, Perdue’s Senate floor leader, announced that his boss, the governor, was about to receive a letter from mortgage giant Freddie Mac saying that Barnes’ effort to curb predatory lending would strike a damaging and perhaps fatal blow at Georgia moneylenders. Such a warning never arrived, yet news that it was on the way was enough to do the job.
The Barnes law was amended to death. Team Perdue killed provisions cracking down on lending rip-offs and high-fee mortgages made to people who could not afford them. Happy days returned to the lenders’ boardrooms. The building boom continued. Just about anybody could get a loan.
By the end of 2003, the number of foreclosures in Georgia shot up about 60 percent, from 8,416 in 2002 to 14,043.
In the same year in Georgia, the FBI reported a potential loss of $15.4 million in fraudulent mortgages. By 2004, the estimated mortgage damages jumped nearly threefold, to a whopping $44.2 million.
Also in 2004, Fulton and DeKalb became the first- and third-ranked counties in the nation with the highest rates of mortgage fraud, according to the Mortgage Asset Research Institute.
By 2007, Georgia had the seventh-highest foreclosure rate and one of the highest bankruptcy rates in the nation. In addition, delinquent borrowers trying to avoid going under discovered that Georgia had perhaps the weakest consumer protection laws in the country. Borrowers’ attorneys reported difficulty even in tracing loans that had been sold and resold (and resold).
The few months in which Georgia could boast of having a model consumer protection law was mostly forgotten.
Wall Street banks, which allegedly had warned Georgia of being overly regulated, were on the ropes, hemorrhaging billions of dollars in paper that had become virtually worthless. The stock market reeled.
Georgia’s elected leaders appeared oblivious to the growing crisis, partly triggered by the imprudent lending practices in their own backyards. Several prominent lawmakers, led by Speaker Glenn Richardson, continued to pound the table in favor of massive tax cuts even as state revenues sagged and a recession appeared inevitable.
While the Legislature remains in session and on the verge of chaos, Gov. Sonny Perdue packs his bags for an extended trip to China.
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/fault-lines/articles/2014/11/6/the-georgia-law-thatmighthaveforestalledtheforeclosurecrisis.html
So we tried to have a law that would say that these practices were unacceptable, and there would be consequences for violating the law. The public policy behind it was: Make it expensive for these banks and lenders, and they’ll stop doing it.
What happened with this law?
It passed. We started in 2001 and met with the lending industry and thought we had a compromise worked out. But they backed out of it. So in 2002 a group of people got together and went to the General Assembly and passed the strongest anti-predatory lending law in the country. And that sent a message to the industry that many of these lending practices were unacceptable and that there would be consequences if they violated the law. It passed in 2002, went into effect in October of 2002.
What was the reaction to the law passing?
The first thing that happened, which was kind of stunning was that the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency exempted all U.S. banks from coverage by the Georgia law, which involved a whole lot of the loans that we were seeing. The next thing that happened was in the next session of the General Assembly in January, 2003. Bankers were everywhere, bankers and their lobbyists, and mortgage companies and brokers, especially, were swarming around the General Assembly trying to get the law undone.
When did the law get weakened?
In March of 2003. From a perspective of many years later, I can say that if that law had stayed in effect in Georgia, and if similar laws had been enacted in other states around the country, we might have not had the financial collapse that we had. Certainly not with the intensity that it occurred. The law had provisions for filing lawsuits against wrongdoers and that could have made a big difference. There could be class-action lawsuits. They would have a tremendous financial adverse effect on any entity violating the law.
If someone wants to work in a slaughterhouse or pick fruit. Hell yah they should be able to get a temporary work permit. Immigration has been a mess in AZ since the Reagan days. Soon the wall will be to hold us in.
Let’s see, we have one hundred thousand illegals per month apprehended at the US southern border, not to mention the additional tens of thousands of illegals per month smuggled in by the cartels not apprehended. Combine this with the current attempt by Congress, on a voice vote only, to increase legal Indian high tech job visas from twenty thousand per year to one hundred thousand per year. Combine this with lottery visas, anchor baby chain migration, family chain migration, HB2 visas etc etc etc. Combine this with the thirty plus million illegals already residing in the US. Yeah, we need more foreign agricultural workers. We are so thoroughly screwed it’s not even funny anymore.