MAGA lawmaker responds to report accusing him of flooding his state with overseas employees | EUROtoday

One of the House’s most conservative members finds himself in an uncomfortable spot as he defends his push for the U.S. to broaden its cap on short-term overseas employees whereas going through criticism from members of his personal social gathering for supposedly betraying Donald Trump’s agenda.

Rep. Andy Harris is Maryland’s lone Republican congressman and chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, a group of lawmakers usually aligned intently with the president however typically in battle with House management over funding ranges and different points.

Harris was profiled by Politico this week as he pushes for the U.S. to broaden the cap on H-2B visas, which permit a most of 66,000 employees to return into the United States yearly and carry out non-agricultural work across the nation. In Harris’s residence state and district, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the immigrant employees are an necessary supply of labor for Maryland’s often-struggling seafood trade.

Trump’s first and second phrases have seen White House and Department of Homeland Security officers intention to situation a decrease variety of H-2B visas than the regulation permits. But Harris, Politico studies, visited the West Wing at an important second this January and persuaded the administration to hike 2026’s rely to only below the authorized cap; 65,000 visas will likely be issued this 12 months by DHS.

“This is not an immigration issue — this is a temporary foreign worker issue,” he insisted to Politico.

Harris is one in all a gaggle of Republicans working with the Senate on the DIGNIDAD Act, a broad piece of immigration laws that will characterize probably the most critical effort by Congress to deal with the difficulty in years. It would broaden E-verification instruments and necessities whereas additionally offering a path for at the moment undocumented employees to reside and work freely in America, although stopping in need of making full citizenship attainable.

For corporations that rely in complete or half on employees utilizing H-2B visas, the laws is massively necessary as a result of it revives a provision as soon as championed by one other Maryland lawmaker, Sen. Barbara Mikulski. Mikulski, a Democrat and legend of the higher chamber who died in 2017, led the hassle for Congress to exclude returning overseas employees from the yearly caps, an efficient gradual enlargement of these caps, which was then dropped at an finish within the first 12 months of Donald Trump’s first time period. Harris is a key ally of that coverage, demonstrating its bipartisan enchantment.

But that isn’t a proof that’s gaining any traction with the anti-immigration hardliners within the Republican Party, together with War Room podcast host Steve Bannon, who raged in regards to the enlargement of the DHS’s H-2B visas with the top of the far-right Immigration Accountability Project throughout a latest episode.

“Where’s your compassion for Americans?” the top of that group, Rosemary Jenks, questioned the lawmakers engaged on the DIGNIDAD Act throughout the interview.

“There are 20 Republicans…who are basically passing off this ‘Dignity Act’, which should be called the ’SAAW Act’, for ‘Screw All American Workers’, that’s what it should be called because that’s what it does,” she added, claiming that “tens of millions” of immigrants would obtain “mass amnesty” for them and their households.

Other members of the Trump administration, like Stephen Miller, stay against the enlargement of H-2B visas and have accused lawmakers who help it of importing “monsters” and “mass murderers”, echoing the worst of his boss’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in opposition to varied ethnic communities.

“The Democrat Party mass imported monsters who are mass murdering Americans. And the Democrat Party and its corrupt judges are fighting relentlessly to keep them here,” Miller wrote on X final week.

It isn’t simply anti-immigration teams like Jenks’s that oppose the rise in H-2B visas. Some unions have spoken out in opposition to the announcement as effectively, claiming it should drive down wages for all employees.

“Flooding the labor market with exploitable foreign workers drives down wages and weakens the standard for all workers, the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) said in a statement. “If employers truly face hiring challenges, the answer is better wages, safer conditions, and real workforce investment.”

Harris enters the spring having cheated his political loss of life. The Maryland state Senate, managed by Democrats, is refusing to deliver up redistricting laws championed by Gov. Wes Moore that was aimed toward redrawing his seat and making it extra favorable to a Democratic candidate and presumably permitting Democrats to take the final of the state’s eight congressional seats. They already management the opposite seven. Moore’s bid was launched in response to an effort to do the identical in Texas and different purple states by Republicans, together with Donald Trump.

The congressman gained his eighth time period within the House by greater than 20 factors over his Democratic challenger in 2024. In that very same cycle, he gained his main by 60 factors. He’s probably insulated from any problem on the appropriate, except he have been to by some means lose the help and endorsement of the president.

Trump did simply that to a number of different Republicans this cycle. In Texas, he withheld his endorsement for incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who subsequently got here in lower than two share factors forward of his closest rival, Ken Paxton, within the first spherical of the first election for his seat in March.

Another sitting Republican senator, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, is now going through a main challenger backed by the president, although Cassidy’s help has not appeared to crater simply but.