Without visas, workers can’t fill seasonal jobs
Carnival operators, hotels hurt as U.S. rethinks H-2B plan
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 Vera cruz 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 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. “Americans don’t want to do it.”
Businesses scramble
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 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.
Visas too few, too late
Lawmakers in May 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.
But business owners said the requirements to apply for visas were onerous and that the extra visas were too few, too late.
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, like landscaping, and that employers could fill the jobs with American workers if they paid more or recruited from outside their area.
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. “I can barely make it day to day.”