I began this week by working on the phone lines and drafting a handful of freedom of information requests related to previous CDM cases. It was my first time working on FOIA documents and although they are not complex argumentative pieces, it was interesting to learn about what type of information can be withheld and why it is important to press the courts for the transparency that is often not given to migrant workers.

The rest of my week was mostly focused on policy advocacy around two pieces of legislation that threaten to expand the amount of workers' rights abuses that migrant workers face. The Carnivals Are Real Entertainment (CARE) Act and Save Our Seafood (SOS) Act are two proposed bills that would greatly reduce the working conditions of carnival and seafood workers respectively. The CARE Act aims to reclassify carnival workers as entertainers and move migrant carnival workers from the H-2B visa to the P visa. Without being too reductive, this is a ridiculous and obvious attempt to strip worker protections from this industry. P visas are what performing artists from foreign countries receive in order to play shows and in the United States. They contain almost no workers' rights protections because they are designed for people like Harry Styles and not the people who wake up before sunrise to set up and operate dangerous carnival rides. Although H-2B visas certainly lack adequate protections, they at least provide a baseline standard of rights. Additionally, the SOS Act attempts to remove the cap on the amount of H-2B visas given to seafood industry employers. This bill is being pushed through by seafood industry employers aiming to further cut their workers' wages through a larger H-2B program. It may seem counterintuitive that CDM would fight against increasing the number of available visas for work in the United States, but this must be seen in the broader context of shifting immigration policy. One of my coworkers described what the federal government is trying to do as privatizing the immigration system. As they close down asylum applications and other legal ways to enter the United States, they are giving employers more programs to recruit and exploit foreign workers on temporary visas that provide no path for citizenship. In this way, private businesses control who can enter the United States and for how long they are allowed to stay. The CARE and SOS Acts are only two bills out of many that are chipping away at the protections that migrant workers and migrants in general have. Along with our policy team, I wrote memos and draft one-pagers for congressional offices to emphasize how these bills in their current forms will harm migrant workers.