Does this administration really want to relieve the pressure to cross our southern border?
A recent decision that could have awarded 16,000 seasonal jobs to the three countries in the Northern Triangle suggests it does not.
If the jobs had been given to workers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, perhaps that many fewer families would be clamoring to enter the U.S. illegally.
These are H-2B, unskilled, non-ag seasonal jobs. Any able-bodied person can do them.
What the administration did, as the Trump administration also did earlier, was to increase the ceiling by 22,000, specifying, this time, that 6,000 of them were to go to people from the Northern Triangle.
What should have been done — if there is to be any increase in the numbers of H-2Bs, which is a pretty dubious notion — was to tell the employers that if they wanted any more H-2Bs they had to recruit them all from the three Central American nations. But that would have inconvenienced some employers, and the trade-off between these employers’ ire and the national need to divert Central Americans from illegal entries was such that the employers — not the national interest — won, yet again.
With 10 million Americans out of work, the admission of the 22,000 additional foreign workers would seem to be unreasonable under any circumstances.