The government headed by Joe Biden plans to grant an additional 22,000 visas for temporary workers by the summer, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Of these, 6,000 would be reserved for people from Central American countries, according to the Reuters news agency.
These H-2B work permits would be in addition to the 66,000 available each fiscal year for seasonal non-farm jobs, such as gardeners, maids or cooks.
Congress establishes this limit, distributed between 33,000 visas for the first half of the fiscal year (from October 1 to March 31) and another 33,000 for the second, but the president can expand the number at his discretion.
The increase, requested by companies given the academic reactivation after the worst phase of the pandemic, has faced opposition from unions that allege high unemployment caused precisely by the coronavirus, according to Reuters.
The unemployment rate, however, is falling rapidly from month to month, and in April it stood at 6%, according to the Labor Department.
The measure is announced in any case just a few weeks after Biden ended the veto of certain work visas and
green cards
imposed by former President Donald Trump.
These bans significantly tightened legal immigration to the United States since they were adopted in June 2020, under the guise of protecting American jobs amid the economic blow of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This week, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has indicated that he will propose to Biden a plan to grant work visas, and then nationality, to immigrants in exchange for planting trees in Mexico and Central America.
With information from The Wall Street Journal and Reuters.
