The Trump administration has quietly decided to allow employers to import 65,000 extra H-2B visa migrants for jobs that would otherwise pay decent wages to ordinary American who vote in the midterm elections.
The visa giveaway is part of President Trump’s zig-zagging between the two sides of his coalition — the voters he needs on election day, and the business donors who provide the funds for political campaigns.
Meanwhile, the national media is ignoring the visa giveaway to business because it is focused on the left-wing street groups who are trying to block the deportation of criminal and wage-cutting illegal migrants from Minneapolis.
“They announced that they were going to release 35,000 [in December], but apparently business owners have complained, so they’re going to release all [66,000],” said Rosemary Jenks, founder of the Immigration Accountability Project.
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The industry group that leads the effort is the landscapers’ lobby, AmericanHort, which asked for the extra visas in December:
The H-2B program places many requirements on employers to recruit U.S. workers, and our members try to find as many U.S. workers as they can. In these unprecedented times, there are simply not enough workers to meet the seasonal workforce needs of U.S. employers. The most current employment data illustrate the workforce struggles of seasonal businesses nationwide.
The administration is allowed to approve the extra 65,000 H-2Bs because of an influential caucus of Democratic and GOP members in Congress, which put the option into the federal budget last year. The extra 65,000 adds to the 66,000 H-2Bs annually mandated by Congress. It brings the annual inflow to at least 131,000 workers for 2026.
“That’s a massive number of cheap foreign workers competing with Americans for jobs and suppressing wages,” Jenks told Breitbart.
The left-wing Economic Policy Institute estimates the H-2B population is roughly 170,000, roughly three times the much-quoted number of 66,000. Congress has included a measure in the pending budgecouldt might boost the annual number to more than 170,000 H-2Bs in 2027.
The H-2B are imported either by staffing firms for lease to employers, or directly by various construction, meatpacking, trucking, landscaping companies, hotels, golfcourses, restaurants, and other businesses eager to hold down wages, she said. Most, but not all, of the jobs are seasonal. Trump’s properties use the H-2B workers.
The better-known and counterproductive H-1B program keeps a million mixed-skill foreigners in white-collar jobs that would otherwise be held by skilled U.S. college graduates. The H-2A visa program is used for farming companies eager to minimize their payroll and investment spending.
Despite President Joe Biden’s inflation and Trump’s border shutdown — which is raising wages for Americans — the H-2B employers “have not raised their wages” for years, Jenks said, adding:
[H2B wages] not even anywhere close to kept up with inflation, and they’re still $11 an hour, or $10 an hour, or maybe $12 an hour. Some of them increased their wages in 2022 and then had them decreased back again. I mean, it’s crazy, and all of that is public information.
The employers are supposed to show that they can’t find an American [for the job], and they’re supposed to pay the same wages to the H-2B as they would to Americans. But if they’re offering, $11 an hour, which is roughly $24,000 a year … that is not anywhere near enough money for any [American] to live in this country, and employers [claim to be] surprised that they can’t find American workers to do these jobs.
The visa giveaway also means that employers face less pressure to find and train sidelined Americans, and less pressure to invest in machines that help American employees get more work done each day.
Since 1990, millions of Americans have been pushed out of the labor market by the inflow of illegal and legalized migrants. Getting them ready for work and off the welfare system only becomes more difficult when starter jobs are filled by healthy migrants desperate for dollars.
Also, the lower wages — and the use of visa workers who bring their wages back home — ensure that local communities are cheated out of the money that would otherwise flow ot local Americans. The lost wages ensure less prosperity, fewer births, less tax revenue, and lower local investment.
The result is that fewer American voters will feel the pocketbook benefit of Trump’s immigration reforms before the November 2026 midterm elections.
But on the other side of the coin, Trump’s cutoff of illegal migrant labor is also forcing most employers to pay decent wages to Americans.
Wages are rising faster in many sectors where migrants are most common, says an analysis of government data by Alan Tonelson.
Restaurant industry advocates say shrinking migration is pushing wages up and profits down:
Fewer workers mean restaurants will once again have to compete for employees the only way they can, by paying higher wages. Wages over the next two years are expected to accelerate, according to Oxford Economics, from 3.7% this year to 5.6% by 2027.
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Median pretax income for restaurants has declined by more than 30% since 2019, according to the National Restaurant Association. That has hurt [Wall Street] valuations: The median restaurant company stock declined 16% last year.
Meanwhile, Democrats are saying that rising wages are making it difficult for Democratic politicians to promise “affordability” in the 2026 election. Democrat Rep. Tom Suozzi (NY) told News Nation in mid-Janaury:
We have to look at all the different factors, even the immigration policy, where we have a million and a half less [migrant] people in the workforce right now, it’s causing more overtime and having to hire people at higher wages. These are all upward pressure[s] on people’s prices.
Democrats and their media allies have been touting their “Affordability Agenda” strategy since their disastrous loss in November 2024 to Trump.
The vague term helps paper over deep splits in the Democratic Party, such as elite support for the H-1B visa worker program that has damaged millions of Democratic-leaning college graduates.
