President Biden’s nominee for the position of labor secretary has come under more fire from Republican senators after one of her underlings disparaged American farmers as “traffickers” and accused them of “wage theft.”
In a Monday letter to acting secretary Julie Su, seen by The Post, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) raised comments by a senior Department of Labor official attacking the federal H-2A visa program, which temporarily lets farmers hire non-immigrant agricultural workers when US citizens are unavailable.
Mike Rios, who serves as regional enforcement coordinator at the department’s Wage and Hour Division, called those who use the program “traffickers” and said the program amounted to “the purchase of humans to perform difficult work under terrible conditions, sometimes including subhuman living conditions,” according to an April 14 report from the left-wing outlet Prism.
“You can throw a rock and hit a violation in the agricultural industry,” Rios also said, telling the outlet that wage theft was “baked into” the federal program.
In a separate podcast interview, Rios also described the H-2A program as “literally buying people to come to do terrible work.”
Cassidy — the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — and Sen. Tedd Budd (R-NC) told Su they found Rios’ remarks “troubling.”
“Mr. Rios’s claim that the H-2A program is equivalent to human slavery … finds no support in law or fact. It is also inflammatory and unbecoming of a...
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