H-2B visa program gets few takers

NOW HIRING: Narragansett Chamber Executive Director Deborah Kelso says most restaurants and hotels can fulfill their staffing by hiring from the local area. / PBN PHOTO/CHRIS SHORES
NOW HIRING: Narragansett Chamber Executive Director Deborah Kelso says most restaurants and hotels can fulfill their staffing by hiring from the local area. / PBN PHOTO/CHRIS SHORES

The Hotel Viking used to fill its many summer job openings with foreign workers temporarily performing labor through the federal government’s H-2B work-visa program. Now the hotel is using foreign students under a different program, called J-1, and General Manager Mark P. Gervais couldn’t be happier.
“We got so fed up with the H-2B that we stopped using it,” Gervais said. “We used it for many, many years, but there were just too many hoops to jump through. We tried J-1 last year and loved it, so we have 15 students coming this year.”
Once a staple of the Ocean State’s tourism and hospitality industries, the H-2B visa program has, in the opinion of some local businesses, become too expensive and burdensome to use. Interest in the program is waning due to stricter regulations; it is becoming obsolete and is slowly being replaced by the J-1 student program.
Gervais said the problem doesn’t lie with the H-2B workers, but the program’s associated costs, paperwork and red tape. “With J-1, the paperwork was less and the workers were great. We were thrilled with the results,” he said.
H-2B visas allow companies to temporarily hire foreign workers to perform nonagricultural labor on a one-time, seasonal basis. H-2B workers are commonly allowed to work for less than one year and can petition to extend their stay. Ultimately, workers must then leave the United States for at least three months before seeking readmission.
Last year, the U.S. Department of State published new rules to the program, requiring wage increases for all visa carriers and extensive documentation practices. The wage increase differs depending on the job but requires participating companies to pay higher than the prevailing wage rate for the specific task, varying for each specific job.
American companies, including the hospitality industry, have challenged the rule. On April 25, a lawsuit in Florida successfully blocked the changes until at least November. A second case, pitting the American Hotel & Lodging Association against the changes, was filed in Louisiana and is still pending.
The National Hotel on Block Island has abandoned the program for the J-1 visa as well. “We used to use the H-2B program and loved it,” said Julie Fuller, general manager of the hotel, “but we stopped because the process became time consuming and expensive.” As with Gervais, she also commented on the high quality of employees. Fuller, however, has five students arriving this summer on the J-1 program. “We liked the H-2B because it gave us greater flexibility to bring people over at different times of the year. Students don’t have that flexibility, but the H-2B still wasn’t worth it,” she said. Recent changes to the J-1 visa program, a four-month visa for students, prohibit employment in warehouses, seafood packing plants and manufacturing factories, as well as adult entertainment and modeling agencies. This stance was emphasized in February, when Robin Lerner, who has a strong civil rights and anti-human trafficking background, was named head of the J-1 visa program. The rules were enacted in response to significant abuse revealed last year, when foreign students protested working conditions at a packing plant for Hershey in Pennsylvania. This summer will be the first time they will be enforced.
The J-1 program is a nonimmigration visa. American businesses use the seasonal staffing to cover workforce needs. It is meant only for full-time university students ages 18 to 28, with at least intermediate English skills. Typically the exchange begins in May. The program is designed for participants to receive medical or business training within the country; locally, however, it is mostly used for cultural exchange.
“We hosted a seminar on the changes in January,” said Deborah Kelso, executive director of the Narragansett Chamber of Commerce. “Our concern was that now, potential employees must prove they have a job prior to applying for the visa. It used to be that they would apply for the visa first. Our Block Island partners are away for the winter, they’re not hiring in January. We wanted to make sure they had enough time to hire but to be quite honest, we had very little participation.”
“I don’t think [businesses in South County] were too concerned. They were on Block Island, but that’s a different dynamic. Employers on the island realize they have to provide housing for their workers. On the mainland there’s not a lot of that left,” she said.
“Most restaurants and hotels can fulfill their staffing by hiring from the local area, from the college students. I think what makes South County different is the University of Rhode Island. We have the seasonal workers here, at our disposal,” Kelso said. “On Cape Cod, for example, they don’t have that, they are very reliant on the international worker. Our seasonal workers are already here, begging for jobs in order to stay here.” When asked about both visas, Dale J. Venturini, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Hospitality Association was candid: “With few exceptions, my members don’t use them anymore because they were so difficult.”
With the H-2B, employers must also pay for worker transportation and border-crossing fees, as well as maintain extensive records of their workers. For most companies, those requirements are labor intensive and expensive. That leaves only the largest companies potentially capable of using the program.
“We’re mostly concerned about the H-2B visas because of those changes,” said Jody Sullivan, executive director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce. “If you ask me about the hospitality industry and the difficulty in finding seasonal employees without going abroad for them, that’s a concern for us. Making the process more cumbersome and increasing the wages that you must pay them is a real burden to some of our hospitality members.”
Some of the extra recordkeeping was enacted to protect American workers from having their jobs taken by temporary workers. Changes require all employers to provide the Department of State with a list of all U.S. applicants referred for employment, a statement of whether the applicant was accepted or rejected and the reason why. Employers would also have to contact all former U.S. workers employed within the last year in the position for which H-2B workers are sought, to provide such employees with the terms and conditions of the job and to solicit their return. Employers would not, however, be required to contact those employees who were terminated for cause or who abandoned the worksite prior to completion of the employment period.
Companies would also have to document the need for workers, and H-2B job orders are to be posted on an electronic job registry and maintained during and after the required recruitment period in an effort to maximize exposure to the work to the widest audience possible and to increase transparency in hiring.
“There’s some perception that a hotel or seasonal employer goes out to use H-2B visa employees, that they are taking jobs away from residents in the area, but the reality is the jobs can’t be filled,” Sullivan said. “They’re advertised and they can’t fill them, nobody wants them, which is ironic in the economic environment we live in today.” •

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