A newly-appointed member of Donald Trump’s Department of Labor “landing team” — tasked with helping set up and implement the transition to a Trump administration — is the president of a recruiting agency that specializes in connecting employers, including major hotels, with temporary laborers from Mexico, the Caribbean, and other parts of the developing world.
Veronica Birkenstock, named to the Department of Labor team on Monday, is the president of Practical Employee Solutions (PES). PES promotes itself as specializing in the use of H-2B visas, having recruited “over 40,000″ workers in fields including hospitality, landscaping, welding, and construction, from 80 different countries. It is also the “preferred vendor of Marriott and Starwood Hotels.”
H-2B visas are reserved for foreign workers who are not immigrants: They come to the country to do typically seasonal, temporary work. The sole purpose of these visas is for nonagricultural employers to bring in employees to do what is basically low-income, low-skilled labor.
Donald Trump campaigned on a form of economic nationalism that puts “America First,” and in his video announcing his plan for his first 100 days, he pledged to have the Department of Labor “investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker.”
The H-2B program has come under criticism for helping suppress wages of domestic workers. The Economic Policy Institute, which Trump frequently cited on the campaign trail, believes that the program leaves “workers vulnerable to low pay and abuse.”
PES advertises videos on its website from the H-2B Workforce Coalition, a coalition of mostly business groups who lobby Congress to protect this visa option.
In one of these videos, owners of landscaping firms testify that they can’t find domestic workers, and that’s why they have to utilize H-2B visas.
Birkenstock has spent the last 20 years working at PES and helping employers find cheap labor. Needless to say, that isn’t America First.
Trump modeling a hard hat during a rally at the Charleston Civic Center on May 5, 2016 in West Virginia.
Opponents of Trump like Mr. Jilani here, have made the error of conflating his anti-illegal immigration stance into an overarching anti-immigration position. Forget the fact that it misrepresents just about everything the man has said about the topic. It’s a far easier balm to our egos to call the guy a xenophobe than to parse out what his position is.
Am I supposed to see some kind of scandal in someone who, according to all accounts, obeyed all applicable hiring and recruiting laws to find labor for jobs that most Americans won’t do? Jobs that are documented and result in proper accounting, remuneration, taxation, etc.
Guess what? Canada has a similar program for drafting seasonal labor for harvesting and we would do well to follow their example in how to treat this underappreciated yet vital sector of our workforce.
This by-the-books approach is exactly the opposite of hiring illegal or undocumented labor which is generally the other alternative that businesses will turn to otherwise. Your not going to see seasonal harvest-picking jobs showing up on Monster.com or Zip Recruiter. So, Mr. Jilani, if you have a better solution than H-2B to fill these jobs let’s hear it.
Great article and all I have to say is:
Sold Out by Michelle Malkin and John Miona
Outsourcing America by Ron Hira
The Surplus American by Charles Derber
Veronica Birkenstock certainly doesn’t appear like an America Firster.
Landscaping firms are too cheap to pay enough for American workers.
Landscaping would be a good transitional opportunity for those leaving incarceration.
Thanks for holding Trump’s feet to the fire.
In the current business environment, H-2B visa workers compete with undocumented workers. This may be the rationale for the appointment of Birkenstock.