Biden To Add 20,000 Guest Worker Visas To Address Labor Shortages

The Biden administration has announced that they will be adding 20,000 season guest worker visas to help address labor shortages during the Winter season. This move is sure to upset conservatives and will likely be used against him in a campaign, but it is absolutely the right move to make. Migrant workers - when treated fairly - are a vital part of the US economy and should be treated as such, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Biden administration announced this week that they're going to be granting an additional 20,000 H2B visas for foreign seasonal guest workers to come into the United States for non agricultural labor in order to help address the labor shortage here in the United States. Now, this is a good thing. It's also, you know, some question marks about it, but let's talk about why it's a good thing real quick. Americans have to understand that migrant labor, immigrants coming into the United States as well, are a vital part of the United States economy. In certain states over the year, Georgia and Florida specifically over the years, have tried to scale back the number of seasonal guest workers that they bring in. That's something Republican governors, not the two that currently run those two states, but past Republican governors had done to pander their hard right bases. Well, what happened is that you had crops rotting in the field in both states. They couldn't find enough workers locally in the state to do these jobs. And because they cut back on the number of visa workers, they lost a ton of money and of course they had to get rid of those caps. They brought the people back in and everything worked out just fine because we depend on that labor.

And it's the same thing here with these other industries. We have 800,000 Americans that have died in the last two years. So that's going to create a problem with the labor market, even though plenty of them were elderly and retired. Some of them were below the working age. Even if you assume a good median, we're still looking at anywhere between 200 and 400 to 500,000 American workers no longer in the workforce because they're dead. So yes, we, we, we need help. We need more people. We, we need workers. Unemployment is dropping here in the United States. Now, do we have the best jobs? Absolutely not. Are we getting fair pay for these jobs? Hell no, we're not. So that's part of the question mark thing I was talking about. We have to protect American workers and we also have to protect the migrant workers. We have to make sure that these corporations who get these H2B visas are not bringing these people in and paying them, you know, pennies on the dollar because they think they can get away with it. We see that far too often with these migrant workers as well. They much like their American worker counterparts need to be compensated fairly for the labor they produce us.

That's the bottom line. If we can do this, if we can execute this program, pay everybody a living wage and not use these migrant workers to replace American workers, because that's another big thing, then we can pull this off and everything will be great. Right. It will be. And we can show this country that migrant workers, the immigrants coming into this country as well, that we need them. It's not just them that want to come here to make a better life and take your stuff. That's not true. The truth is we need them more than they need us and that's the winning political message. But you can rest assured that Republicans are gonna try to use this against Biden. They're gonna use it against the Democratic party in the 2022 midterms. There's no getting around that. So that's why I'm telling the Democrats right now the message to use to get around it. We depend on them. If we treat them like human beings.