Without visas, carnival workers are trapped at home in Mexico
TLAPACOYAN, Mexico — Francisco Trujillo heads north each summer to do a job few Americans want: a four-month stint operating carnival rides, mopping up vomit and sleeping in a cramped trailer with other workers.
His annual journey to the United States was a routine shared by many in the shabby city of Tlapacoyan, about 190 miles east of Mexico City in the hills of Veracruz state, which supplies two-thirds or more of the 7,000 foreign workers hired by America’s amusement sector each year.
This year, however, Trujillo, 32, is not selling tickets for the Super Shot vertical drop or doling out funnel cakes. Caught in a debate over how many visas the U.S. government should issue to seasonal workers, he is among thousands of Mexicans stuck at home, unable to get permission to work across the border.
“They say we are taking jobs from the Americans,” said Trujillo, who has worked the last four carnival seasons in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Carnival work is “really hard,” he said, adding, “Americans don’t want to do it.”
As American politicians and business owners wrangle over the limits on the number of H-2B visas for unskilled, nonagricultural workers, Tlapacoyan, with about 60,000 residents in the town and surrounding area, offers a glimpse of how the impasse has stung in Mexico. Last year, Mexicans received more than 70 percent of the approximately 84,000 H-2B visas issued by the United States to migrant workers worldwide.
The lack of visas has denied hundreds of families in the city an annual income that saves them from living hand-to-mouth and deepened the problems of a town struggling, like much of the state, with high crime rates. Of an estimated 4,600 to 6,000 residents who normally work the carnival season, according to city officials and recruiters, about a third have been left behind.
Instead, they are selling tacos and driving taxis, or working for just over $1 an hour in the tangerine and banana fields that surround the town. Some use Google Translate and WhatsApp to check their visa status with their former U.S. employers.
Trujillo is working as a driver for a construction crew, earning about $85 a week, less than a quarter of his carnival salary.
He used savings from his time in the United States to buy a plot of land and build a one-bedroom house, even splurging on a $350 stroller for his son, now 22 months old. This year, however, “there will be no proper Christmas, no presents, no turkey,” Trujillo said. He abandoned plans to take his son to a safari park in nearby Puebla state for his birthday. “I can barely make it day to day.”
The visa problems began in March when the summer allotment of H-2Bs ran out, leaving some U.S. businesses scrambling for people to clean hotel rooms, run Ferris wheels and fish for shrimp. Demand for visas was high, said recruiters and experts, and Congress did not renew a provision that had excluded returning H-2B workers from counting against the total quota of 66,000 visas, which is split evenly between summer and winter.
Lawmakers in May then granted the government authority to more or less double the cap on this year’s quota to save “American business from irreparable harm,” and the White House on July 17 authorized an increase of 15,000 visas, bringing the total number available close to the number issued last year.
But business owners who have been waiting to bring seasonal workers said the requirements to apply for visas were onerous and that the extra visas were too few, too late.
Deborah Murray, one of the owners of Murray Bros., a carnival company based in Cincinnati, said she had scaled back this year because she could not muster 30 reliable workers. She applied months ago for 12 visas for Mexican workers; she received four last week.
“You can never really recover,” said Murray, who spoke by telephone from a Cincinnati church festival where she said she was running five rides instead of the usual 10. “I’ve been working since April and I’m a week from August,” she said. “The season is gone.”
Critics of the current H-2B system said statistics did not support claims that U.S. labor was scarce in sectors that use a lot of the visas, such as landscaping, and that employers could fill the jobs with American workers if they paid more or recruited from outside their area.
The visa program also ties foreign workers to one employer, making them susceptible to exploitation, according to Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Some recruiters demand payment, a practice banned in the United States, which saddles workers with debt and may make them more acquiescent.
Rather than having employers determine how many foreign workers they need, the government could set up an independent body to identify labor shortages and allocate visas, Costa said.
“It’s only fair to set the system in a way that they are not exploited,” he said, referring to migrant workers. “Otherwise employers will try to keep wages down.”