The U.S. government should import foreign workers for home construction jobs and also pay them with shares of American citizenship, an industry executive demanded Wednesday at an advocacy event held by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“We, right now, this year, need 430,000 workers [and] over the next couple years by 2023, we’re going to need probably another million,” said Michael Bellaman, the president and CEO of the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group. He continued:
We need a merit-based, market-based, rule-of-law worker visa system that provides the necessary opportunities for [foreign] people that want to work in the United States, as well as for our employers to take those trained [foreign] individuals that have spent three years [working] in their companies, with the opportunity to sponsor them to a pathway to citizenship, a legal form of status, something more permanent, that will be a value to our industry.
The demand is a deep betrayal of fellow Americans by the business interests, responded Roy Beck, the former journalist who founded NumbersUSA to oppose the outsourcing of jobs to migration.
“There’s an ethical bond that connects” Americans, he said, “but what people from George Bush, especially George W. Bush, on through President Biden have done — with some exception for President Trump- is to disconnect and basically free the elites of this country from any sense of ethical obligation to their fellow citizens.” Read more…
