So much for President Donald Trump’s ‘Hire American’ promise.

Just two weeks after Trump signed an executive order vowing to crack down on a programme designed to import high-skilled foreign labour, a provision slipped into the budget compromise with Democrats this week could double the number of visas for low-wage, seasonal workers such as those in the landscaping, forestry and hospitality industries.

The guest worker visa, known as the H-2B, is the exact kind that helps Trump staff his Mar-a-Lago golf resort.

Critics said the provision in the shutdown deal illustrates the limits of Trump’s ‘America First’ ideology. Economic realities and the complexities of immigration cannot be boiled down to a simple campaign slogan or governing platform, they argue.

“If Trump signs the bill and doesn’t speak out against this, that will contradict everything he has said about ‘Hire American,’ “ said Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Council.”This appropriations bill gives companies incentive to hire underpaid indentured workers.”

The H-2B programme has drawn strong bipartisan support in the past because lawmakers have a vested interest in supporting their states’ most critical industries — whether it’s crab picking in Maryland, ski resorts in Colorado, or logging in Washington. But some senators are criticising their colleagues’ efforts to bypass public debate about changing immigration law.

Current law limits the number of such visas issued to 66,000 a year. The number could double under the budget bill being considered.

The draft bill allows the Secretary of Homeland Security, after consulting with the Secretary of Labour, to increase the number of foreign workers “upon determination that the needs of American businesses cannot be satisfied in fiscal year 2017 with United States workers who are willing, qualified, and able to perform temporary non-agricultural labour.”

(Farm workers enter the US under a different visa, known as the H-2A. The Trump Winery in Charlottesville also employs workers on H-2A visas to help prune its vineyards.)

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on how expanding the number of low-wage seasonal workers squares with Trump’s ‘America First’ platform.

Industry representatives say there is no conflict because increasing the number of foreign guest workers will help preserve American jobs.

In Virginia, a number of crab picking, oyster shucking and bait packing plants would be out of business without the H-2B visas, said Mike Hutt, executive director of the Virginia Marine Products Board, which represents the state’s seafood industry.

The 66,000 cap has already been reached this year. Visas for more than 120,000 positions were requested, according to Department of Labour statistics. And the seafood industry, whose hiring season began in April, competes with other industries like landscaping and tourism that rely heavily on temporary summer workers.

“We are not finding Americans who want to do this work,” Hutt said.

The average worker in Virginia seafood plants is between 50 and 60 years old, said A.J. Erskine, chairman of the Virginia Seafood Council. Young people aspire to go to college, he said — not toil up to 12 hours a day at $10 an hour in the tough working conditions of seafood manufacturing.

“We recruit all year long and come up with very little labour that is reliable and available,” Erskine said. “We certainly believe in ‘Hire American’ but when you’re in a business that doesn’t have a labour pool to choose from, I’m not sure how else we would source labour. Without this temporary worker programme, seafood businesses around the country would not operate.”

The seafood industry in Virginia alone requires between 500 to 1,000 H-2B visas each year, he said. Nearly all the workers come from Mexico, he said.

Without the foreign labour, there would be a devastating impact on the local and state economy, he said. Trucking, boating, packaging, refrigeration, and fuel companies all rely on the seafood industry for steady work. Restaurants and grocery stores also count on the workers’ paychecks.

“It’s a big domino effect,” Hutt said. “This is Americans first. It we don’t get these workers, we will lose the local jobs.”

The industry has lobbied for a separate ‘seafood visa’ to meet its needs, according to a new report by New American Economy to be released last Wednesday. Some plants have also turned to undocumented workers to fill the most difficult jobs, the report said.

Paul Mendelsohn, lobbyist for the National Association of Landscape Professionals, said the industry would prefer to hire locally. It just can’t find Americans to do the work despite the fact that most jobs start at $12 an hour.

“If anyone walks in and can pick up a shovel and do hard labour, then companies are pretty much required to hire them,” Mendelsohn said.

But some critics dispute that there really is a labour shortage in the industries that rely heaviest on the seasonal guest worker visas.

In landscaping, which accounts for about half of the H-2B visas issued, the unemployment rate was 8.6pc for the first quarter of 2017, nearly double the national rate, said Costa, of the Economic Policy Institute. The unemployment rate is 11.3pc in fishing and forestry, he said, and 10pc in construction, where there are three unemployed workers for every job opening.

Costa said the institute’s research has shown that wage rules often allow seasonal workers to be paid less than local average wages for US workers in similar jobs. The H-2B workers, he said, earn no more than undocumented workers, on average. The workers are also vulnerable to abuse by their employers, to whom they are bound, he said.

—The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, May 8th, 2017