During a call-in press conference on Wednesday, Tom Nassif, President and CEO of the Western Growers Association (WGA), made a push for amnesty to bring in more foreign workers in order to drive down rising wages. He alleged that there is a labor shortage that is causing competition among businesses and that “wages are going up dramatically”.
“All it [labor shortage] does is encourage people who are farmworkers to play musical chairs by going from farmer to farmer, seeking higher wages, and the farmers are competing with each other [for American and illegal workers] by raising those wages,” Nassif who leads one of the most influential Ag lobby groups in the country, said on the call.
The same labor shortage argument is used by tech companies to hire cheaper, foreign workers through the H-1B and other worker visas while laying off American workers. Earlier this year a former Disney tech employee, Leo Perrero, testified before Congress about his experience of having to train his foreign replacement before he was laid off.
The press conference on Wednesday was to introduce a new lobbying group, Partnership for a New American Economy, created by Disney, Bloomberg, and other media and tech companies, that will advocate for amnesty and other Gang of Eight style immigration reforms in 2017. Recently at a townhall, Speaker Paul Ryan repeated his support for such polices as amnesty for the approximate 11 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S., which would increase worker competition and decrease American wages.
Under our current immigration system, the U.S. brings in around 1 million temporary workers through visas and grants another 1 million people green cards every year.
Read more on this story at Breitbart.
