Republican senators have intensified their criticism of President Biden’s nominee for labor secretary after one of the deputies claimed that a visa program utilized by American farmers was plagued with “traffickers” and “wage theft.”
In a letter to acting secretary Julie Su that was obtained by The Post on Monday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) brought up comments made by a top Department of Labor official criticizing the federal H-2A visa program, which temporarily permits farmers to hire non-immigrant agricultural labor when US nationals are not available.
According to a report from the left-wing outlet Prism on April 14, Mike Rios, the regional enforcement coordinator at the department’s Wage and Hour Division, referred to recruiters hired to headhunt foreign workers as “traffickers” and argued that the program amounted to “the purchase of humans to perform difficult work under terrible conditions, sometimes including subhuman living conditions.”
Rios further described the H-2A program as “literally buying people to come to do terrible work.”
Sen. Tedd Budd (R-NC), a leading Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Cassidy expressed their concerns to Su about Rios’ “troubling” comments.
They asserted that if Rios’ remarks were true, Su was either ignoring her responsibilities or displaying a “startling bias against American farmers.”
They claimed that the DOL is either not doing an adequate job of imposing the law or the authorities have a bias towards American farmers who use the program if they think that the H-2A program is riddled with wage theft and human trafficking.
Furthermore, they stated that farmers who recruit hired hands must pay for housing and the worker’s transit from their country of origin to the US .
The Chamber of Commerce’s recent statistics showed that there are only 5.8 million unemployed people and 9.9 million available positions in the US.
Rios’ comments might make it more difficult for the Senate to approve Su, which could happen as soon as this week, as stated by a GOP aide.
Despite the fact that Su was in charge of billions of dollars’ worth of illegal COVID-19 unemployment payouts while serving as California’s labor commissioner, Biden nominated Su in February to lead the Labor Department in its entirety.
If approved, Su will succeed Marty Walsh, the former labor secretary who resigned from the government to lead the National Hockey League Players Association.
