Illegal Border Crossings Today:

Dismissing American Workers, USCIS Boss Takes Liberties to Boost ‘Legal’ Immigration

Broken US Flag, Worker Tools, Ur Jaddou USCIS

While illegal aliens continue to flood America’s southern border, the Biden administration and immigration enthusiasts are working to substantially increase and accelerate the arrival of “legal” migrants.

Aimed at filling U.S. jobs with foreign labor, a series of new executive actions is percolating in Washington. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ur Jaddou let the mask slip this week when she cited a “critical need for more lower-wage workers.”

The push for more foreign workers is predicated on lower U.S. unemployment rates (as though this were a problem that needs to be fixed). But this ignores some key metrics.

In addition to 5.9 million jobless workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counted 4.9 million working-age Americans sitting outside the labor pool last month. These “discouraged workers” are not included because they were not actively seeking employment during the four weeks preceding the survey.

BLS also revealed that hirings continue to trend downward, with the March figure the lowest since President Biden took office. Hourly wages declined, too, as did the average number of hours worked.

The Economic Policy Institute reports that the 30 largest Silicon Valley tech corporations are continuing mass layoffs in the U.S. as they import more than 34,000 lower-paid H-1B visa workers.

Jaddou boasts that her agency issued record numbers of work visas last year, and, going forward, she is pursuing administrative schemes that would “eliminate barriers” to entry. Among them: an expedited petitioning process to admit foreign nationals “independent of labor market tests.”

Expansion of the “International Entrepreneur Rule” (IER), imposed in the last days of the Obama administration, is one way around labor market evaluations (which are rarely applied anyway). Ostensibly created to provide a “significant public benefit,” IER has no statutory or regulatory definition of that.

Despite slackening labor market conditions, Jaddou and her mass immigration allies want to expand work visas to include working spouses while extending stays of temporary workers. USCIS, she proudly proclaims, doubled the number of green cards issued before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meantime, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), where Jaddou made her comments, is pushing a smorgasbord of 21 administrative fixes, including:

  • Giving temporary workers time to find new U.S. jobs amid layoffs.
  • Speeding State Department visa processing through interview waivers.
  • Shortening required forms and restricting requests for evidence of eligibility.

There’s a problem with all of this. The “barriers” that Jaddou wants to take down are founded on laws duly enacted by Congress and deliberately put in place to protect American workers. This administration, on track to issue more executive orders than any in U.S. history, considers such laws subject to its political machinations.

MPI policy analyst Kate Hooper correctly notes that there must be a “balance between [immigration] access and oversight.” With Jaddou and her cohorts at the wheel, oversight is taking a backseat in a reckless drive to increase the flow of foreign nationals by any means.