Visa delays, restrictions result in shortage of laborers
At least one local landscaper closing
Over nearly 50 years, LMS Greenhouse & Nursery grew into a sprawling landscaping company with 10 full-time employees growing flowers and trees in a 15-acre garden center in Hampton, planting lawns and sculpting colorful designs for homes and businesses.
Each spring since 2003, company president Richard Cafaro has leaned on the help of 10 workers from Mexico — paying for their travel to the United States and even buying a duplex in Sharpsburg to rent to them. “They became like family,” he said.
This week, the garden center’s shelves were empty, weeds sprouted up through the ground and a fleet of 10 trucks had been sold. Mr. Cafaro is liquidating, laying off 10 American workers and getting ready to close the shop for good on Saturday.
The cause: the loss of half of his expected workforce as a result of delays and restrictions in the U.S. visa system.
“I held on as long as I could …
we just ran out of cash,” Mr. Cafaro said. “Our product is labor, and when the labor’s cut out from under you, I don’t have a product to deliver.”
LMS Greenhouse & Nursery’s abrupt closure — and pain for landscapers across the Pittsburgh region — brings home an increasingly hostile political debate over immigration policy. The Trump administration’s sharpening rhetoric about rooting out fraud and the clamp-down on border security have extended to the legal guest worker system.
In particular, federal officials are holding up H-2B visas that supplement a wide range of nonagricultural, labor-intensive jobs in landscaping, golf course maintenance, hotels, theme parks, roofing and seafood processing.
A cap on workers
H-2B visas, which allow up to 66,000 foreign workers annually into the country, have always been somewhat contentious. Landscapers say it’s a springtime ritual to cope with uncertainty and last-minute fixes from lawmakers.
But now the economy is running near full steam — U.S. unemployment fell to an 18-year low in May, and there are more openings than people looking for jobs for the first time since at least 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor announced last week.
Since October, employers seeking H-2Bs have submitted applications for more than 142,000 foreign worker positions, according to the Labor Department. Any American company seeking approval to use the visas must, among other things, first advertise the job to American workers and prove that no one applied.
More than half of the applications came from landscaping companies, which have pressed Congress to pass legislation to eliminate the 66,000-worker cap established in 1992.
“This cap number is arbitrary, and it doesn’t in any way reflect the economic need,” said Laurie Flanagan, who represents AmericanHort and the National Association of Landscape Professionals as a co-chair of the H-2B Workforce Coalition, based in Washington, D.C.
In the federal budget approved March 23, Congress gave the U.S. Department of Homeland Security authority to issue more visas. Two months passed before the department announced May 31 it would issue 15,000 more. On Wednesday, it announced a lottery would occur soon, with no date set.
“That 15,000 number is clearly not enough,” Ms. Flanagan said. “This has been very devastating to small businesses … Unfortunately, we’re subject to the will of Congress.”
More jobs than workers
Mr. Cafaro was accustomed to H-2B delays each spring, caused by auditing and the program’s requirements. He has never gotten a response to job advertisements, he said.
But he was incredulous when, even after Congress authorized more visas, DHS balked.
“I thought there’s no way they’re not going to send the workers. There’s just no way,” he said in an interview in his office above the store. “It’s a shame because [the government] didn’t do a thing. They didn’t give a timeline. We were just in limbo.”
In interviews, others said they feel punished for trying to legally source labor they need to operate.
Burns & Scalo Roofing has received no visas for the 27 foreign workers that the Thornburg-based company needs, said Donna Bodnar, director of recruiting and staffing development. It plans to participate in the lottery.
“Everyone’s working overtime, we have managers that are back on the roof working. … Our American workers are begging for the guest workers to come up,” she said.
Burns & Scalo spends about $2,000 per worker in paperwork and fees, she added. “Why would we spend all this money if we could find American workers?”
Moving mulch and rocks
Even companies that received their allotment of visas worry about the prospect of losing the lottery each spring.
“I’m not expanding the way I would be expanding,” said Evan Evanovich, owner of a Bethel Park landscape company that has 15 workers with H-2B visas. “I got lucky” in getting the visas this year, he said.
Over lunch at Jim & Lou Lou’s diner on South Park Road, he lamented what he sees as a societal shift away from manual labor and long workdays. He ate with his son, Derrick, and two of Derrick’s friends who joined the business. Mr. Evanovich said the visa shortage jeopardizes his plans to pass the business to his son.
He drove to three sites to show off his company’s work. At one home, a portion of the lawn had been replaced with 65 yards of shredded topsoil, 40 yards of mulch, 51 lights and a scattering of boulders weighing 80 to 250 pounds each. A sidewalk snaked artfully through the display.
The job was done in two days, Mr. Evanovich boasted, mostly by hand.
His business, The Landscape Center by Evanovich, supports manufacturers, growers, equipment dealers, mulch sellers. He is loyal to a specific brand of mulch, made in Pennsylvania near the West Virginia border, that can hold its color for eight months.
“Now tell me where I can find an American worker and have them do this work in two days,” he said.
Searching for a fix
Last year, the Labor Department announced stepped-up prosecution of employers who cheat the legal work visa system, which includes the most recognized H-1B program admitting workers for specialty occupations like information technology and higher education, as well as the H-2A program for agricultural employers.
The H-2B has taken center stage recently. On Tuesday, about 200 federal immigration enforcement officers stormed two locations of landscape company Corso’s Flower and Garden Center in Sandusky, Ohio. They rounded up 114 people suspected of being in the country illegally.
The same day, a report from a Washington, D.C.based nonprofit found that about 800 people holding guest worker visas were illegally trafficked into the U.S. from 2015 to 2017 and more were subject to abuse, wage theft and discrimination.
The H-2B Workforce Coalition is pushing for a law that exempts workers who have been approved for visas in prior years. The exemption was in place from 2005 to 2007 and again in 2016 — and it might have saved LMS Greenhouse & Nursery.
On May 2, a post on the landscaper’s Facebook page announced the decision to close. “Due to this government policy, LMS has been forced to cease all landscape and lawn services operations and let any remaining American workers go,” the post said.
The post received 77 shares and 102 comments, most sympathetic — but some blamed the company for not trying harder to hire Americans.
“As an owner, you feel like you’ve failed,” said Mr. Cafaro, whose two uncles started the business in 1970. “This is just sad — it’s depressing.”
“I don’t think it’s hit me yet, but it’s starting to hit me,” he said. “It will hit me when I close the gate on Saturday.”