Back on the campaign trail, when Trump said something outlandish like “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”, we on the left were scolded for taking him literally. ”He’s only talking about the bad ones, all the illegal immigrants.”
Well, seems some people are just so shocked that a politician kept their word and is actually impacting their daily lives via a reduction in foreign workers. This system was made in the early 1950s and has two components. H2A visas apply to agriculture and H2B to non-agriculture. There’s about 140,000 H2A visas and H2B’s 66,000 visas available, though the government could expand the number of annual H-2B visas to 130,000.
With a recent reduction in the numbers of visas issued, some Trump-supporters feel as if they’ve been “tricked by the devil” as that leopard bite is turning out to be more than just a flesh wound.
Devine says it has been years since he could find enough dependable, drug-free American workers for his $12-an-hour jobs mowing and tending landscapes for cemeteries, shopping centers and apartment complexes across Central Kentucky.
So for years he has hired 20 seasonal workers, mostly from Guatemala, through the U.S. Labor Department’s H2B “guest worker” program. Importing these workers for a few months cost him an additional $18,000 in fees and expenses beyond their wages, which must be the same as he pays American workers. But that’s the only way he could serve his customers.
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Devine says he lost a $100,000 account because he didn’t have enough men to do the job. He’s worried he may be out of business next year if things don’t improve.
A lot of the businesses exposed to this problem rely on cheap manual labor to do hard and generally unwanted tasks. Always with a variant of “No American wants to do this”. Maybe if Devine ran a resort of golf club he could have obtained those H2B visas a bit easier.
If businesses can’t hire that sweet cheap labor, they’ll have to charge more. Here in Maryland, crab picking is a fun afternoon meal. Not so much a day-to-day job though. Yet rural areas here are worried about this season’s harvest, fretting that “A typical crab cake might be four times the price” without more workers.
While the town usually receives 500 visas for crab pickers, only about 300 were approved this year.
Forty years ago, women who lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore would pick crab meat. But as their children grew older, more educated and left town, that workforce dried up and businesses turned to the H-2B visa program to bring in foreign workers.
"We've been doing this 25 years the right way, the way the government wanted," [Harry Phillips, owner of Russell Hall Seafood] said. "They're not a threat to the community, they spend money in the community and they do their banking here. So to me that looks like a win-win situation."
"I do not have any Americans that want to do this job," said Brian Hall, the owner of G.W. Hall & Sons seafood, one of the few facilities on the island that was able to secure enough H-2B visas this year. "We support a lot of different businesses from a lot of different states and it's all because of these H-2B girls."
The Trump administration is also screwing over businesses that use highly educated or specialized "workers in short supply" who are covered by H-1B visas. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a memo earlier this year that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for companies to hire foreign professionals. Oh, and bonus points for making the choice easier for companies to off-shore jobs since it’s easier to get workers.
[Vic Goel, managing partner, Goel & Anderson] noted the apparent intention of USCIS is to have a “chilling effect” on the relationship between companies and their clients. “Few clients will be comfortable weighing in on what an individual employee of a contractor will be working on and whether his or her job requires a specific degree. While it’s clear that USCIS intended to take aim at IT outsourcing firms with this change, its implications will be felt in other industries, and by investors and consumers in the long run.”
If the policy holds, one likely result will be a greater emphasis on shifting work outside the United States to overcome what employers and their customers perceive as U.S. government micromanaging of legitimate contractual relationships between companies.
And remember those ICE crackdowns on 7-11 earlier this year? Part of a ramped-up effort to go after employers using immigrant labor.
Derek Benner, head of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit, told The Associated Press that another nationwide wave of audits planned this summer would push the total "well over" 5,000 by Sept 30. ICE audits peaked at 3,127 in 2013.
The agency has developed a plan to open as many as 15,000 audits a year, subject to funding and support for the plan from other areas of the administration, Benner said.
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Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and an advocate for an employer crackdown, said the numbers show that the administration is following through on its pledge to scrutinize businesses but that it could take a while for a "culture of compliance" to take hold.
"My hope is we're going to see some employers perp-walked, but that's harder than it sounds," he said. "It's hard to get the suits at a company ... They will have told lower-level managers what to do with a wink and a nod and there's no record of it."
Personally, I’m alright with cracking down on employers hiring illegal immigrants. How these raids are conducted is another topic, and having a perp-walk of executives should be more impactful than arresting a store clerk. The only other “positive” I can see from this immigrant labor shortage is a potential in raising wages. With unemployment at record lows, there’s only so many potential workers to go around.