Tighter U.S. immigration rules beach Maid of the Mist skippers
The U.S. government’s tighter immigration policy appears to have swept up some employees in a small transportation company
that’s also a beloved tourist attraction: the Maid of the Mist.
Two seasoned Canadian captains at the Maid of the Mist — those boats that run tourists breathtakingly close to Niagara Falls and return them to shore about 20 minutes later, sopping wet but safe — said they were let go this month after being told
that the U.S. company could not obtain seasonal work visas for them. About six Canadian crew members have been affected, the captains said.
“We were in shock,”
Capt. Paul Chaperon said this week.
Chaperon posted his bad news on Facebook. For him, it meant the abrupt end of a career, just as he was near- ing retirement.
Chaperon, a native of the island nation of Mauritius who first went to sea as a teenager, said he started working for the Maid of the Mist 14 years ago. The nature of the job — which navigates the Niagara River back and forth across the U.S.-Cana- dian border — also helped create an unusual situation in regard to the Canadian employees’ visa status.
That’s because the boats, whose keels were laid in Canada, are flagged as Canadian vessels. When the company lost its lease on the Cana- dian side of the river and moved to the United States, Chaperon and other Canadians who remained with the company were required to obtain seasonal H-2B visas from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services . Chap- eron said obtaining those visas had been routine every year — until now.
“We can’t work anymore because of that immigration policy,” Chaperon said. The captains’ story is one
that has played out across entire industries as seafood processors, farmers
and others feel the effects of the Trump administration’s “America First” policies. This past winter, the administration announced that it would for the first time ever distribute the temporary visas through a lottery instead of on a first-come, first-served basis.
Supporters say the tighter policies have given U.S. citizens first dibs on some jobs and helped drive up wages. Critics say the hard-line immigration policies have created labor shortages and higher costs that will eventually hit consumers.
As travel goes, the Maid of the Mist probably delivers more enjoyment per distance traveled than most vessels. Each boat — Maid of the Mist VI and Maid of
the Mist VII — packs about 600 people per trip. They don ponchos and ooh and ahh at the Niagara River’s 167-foot drop.
The boats have been making the short circuit around the falls for more than 130 years, the company’s website says.