USA IMMIGRATION NEWS

Overseas workers urgently needed for seasonal US businesses

Saturday, 1 March 2008

Owners of seasonal businesses in the United States are desperately looking for workers abroad.

They fear that the ongoing debate in Washington D.C. about the H-2B visa program is going to hamper the amount of workers they need for this upcoming summer.

The H-2B visa program allows foreign workers to come to the United States for up to a year so they can provide temporary help to businesses, such as to a landscaping company in Manchester or a ski resort in Vermont.

Congress has not renewed an exemption in immigration law, essentially cutting off a key supply of foreign labour to seasonal.

For some of these businesses, peak season is still a couple of months away, but the owners already don't know how they'll handle the crush, as nearly half of their workforce can't get a visa to come back to the

United States.

"To be honest, I also try to get American workers because I still need them every spring," Jeff Comerford, owner of Comfort Lawn Service Inc. in Manchester, said. "But it's gotten to the point over the last 10 years that I hardly get a response."

He explained that this could be because his business's season lasts from March until the first week of December — a time which virtually rules out students, a segment of the workforce that otherwise might be well suited for the manual labour.

How it works, is that New Jersey businesses first need to try to find US workers by advertising job openings in a newspaper and working with the New Jersey Department of Labour and Workforce Development.

Once there are no American takers, they can turn to the popular H-2B program. Congress in fiscal 2008 allocated 66,000 H-2B visas, which will be divided as follows: 33,000 for workers for the first six months of the fiscal year and 33,000 for workers for the following six months of the fiscal year.

But, revealed Shawn Saucier, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the demand for the summer is so high that the United States already reached its cap for the second half of the year on Jan. 2.

To ease the demand, Congress provided an exemption and ruled that any worker who had received an H-2B visa in any of the previous three years didn't count toward the cap. This decision cleared the way for an extra 16,044 workers in 2005; 50,854 in 2006; and 69,320 in 2007.

But to the seasonal businesses' dismay, Congress did not include the exemption this year, despite intense lobbying by the business community.

It's been said that an alliance of congressmen has refused to act on the exemption unless it is part of comprehensive immigration reform.

"There's not enough seasonal workforce[s] to cover the needs of industry," Deborah Dowdell, president of the New Jersey Restaurant Association said. She explained that the summer is such a short window for an abundance of business that's conducted here, and that there's definitely a shortage of workers in the United States.

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