The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tourist getaway deals with worker shortage
Lack of visas for foreign workers stymies hiring.
Mackinac Island has a permanent population of about 500 people and just as many horses, but no cars. From May to October, the picturesque Michigan getaway relies on about 3,000 workers to power its economic engine: summer tourism.
Historically, up to a third of those workers are foreigners, including Mexicans, Filipinos, Canadians and Jamaicans, who are hired on seasonal visas. But when many of the island’s business owners applied for those visas this year, they heard from the government that none were left.
So at the Iroquois Hotel, a Victorian property on the waterfront where rooms command up to $1,200 a night, the owner is trying to figure out how to maintain its high standards without 30 Jamaican housekeepers. Other hotels are contemplating closing off whole sections. Even those who own the ubiquitous horses are wondering if they will have enough workers.
“It’s urgent for us to get more visas to save the season,” Brad Chambers, who operates horse tours and taxis, said.
The island whose selling point is being stuck in time is now suffering because it is stuck in the middle of a modern-day struggle over jobs and who should be doing them. So, too, are a number of the regional industries that define the American summer but have increasingly relied on non-American workers, from vacation spots in Maine and Minnesota to Gulf Coast shrimpers and the salmon fisheries of Alaska.
The visas in question, known as H-2Bs, have an annual nationwide quota of 66,000, divided between winter and summer. But the summer allotment was exhausted quickly because Congress, concerned about the program’s impact on American workers, chose in December not to renew a provision that allowed workers who had H-2Bs in some previous years to work without being counted against the quota. That decision effectively sliced the number of visas by at least 50 percent.
Congress has also given Homeland Security Director John Kelly the authority to release more visas, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers urged him in a May 12 letter to do so swiftly.
Citing the importance of the $5.8 billion seafood industry to her state, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told Kelly during a recent Senate hearing that a “short-term fix is urgently needed.”
Kelly responded, “For every senator or congressman who has your view, I have another who says, ‘Don’t you dare. This is about American jobs.’”
He added that he would probably release additional visas but did not specify when or how many. Even if he does, it would take two to four weeks for new workers to arrive because they must first pass an interview at a U.S. consulate in their country of origin to obtain a visa.
President Donald Trump — who uses H-2B workers in the winter at his Mar-aLago club in Palm Beach, Fla. — campaigned on a promise of reducing immigration and protecting U.S. jobs. And while the H-2B, the offshoot of a temporary work visa created in 1952, has spawned less controversy than the H-1B visas for tech and other skilled workers, critics say the program displaces Americans just the same.
Unions, citing low wages, dispute employers’ assertions that they need the visas because domestic workers will not take the low-skilled jobs. In a 2015 report, the Labor Department’s inspector general expressed concern that employers were not trying hard enough to recruit Americans, as they are required to do before applying for the visas. The department has also documented cases of exploitation of foreign workers.
“Immigration flows are often driven by a desire to exploit a new foreign labor pool,” said Dan Stein, the president of Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates stricter immigration policies. “Nowhere is there more evidence of this than in the illegal and temporary foreign labor pools.”
Employers say that they would not use a program they regard as bureaucratic and expensive — they must pay fees for lawyers and for workers’ transportation to the United States — unless they had to. And they complain that they are falling victim to a dysfunctional immigration system, even as they do the right thing by hiring legal workers.
Simply put, the companies say, Americans are not very interested in menial, shortterm work.
On Mackinac, Chambers, the horse-tour operator, said he had found five workers to fill 20 positions for which he sought H-2B visas.
“We have done recruiting over the internet, in newspapers and in horse country to get people to come,” he said.
His great-great-grandfather wrote a bill in 1898 banning cars, giving the island in Lake Huron its vintage appeal that draws a million visitors annually.
The 393-room Grand Hotel, the setting for the 1979 movie “Somewhere in Time,” starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, has been hiring seasonal foreign workers for decades.
“Without them, we would be looking at changing our entire business model,” Jennifer King, general manager of the property, said.
The hotel got the visas it needed. Other businesses on the island have not been as lucky.
Phil Harrington, the sous chef at Yankee Rebel Tavern, has been coming in at noon instead of 3 p.m. to make sure preparations are complete before dinner guests arrive.
“With the shortage of visas, it’s more stress on me and others who have to work longer hours to do more of the grunt work,” he said while chopping herbs, a task usually relegated to foreign workers.
Patti Ann Moskwa, the owner and a fourth-generation restaurateur, has been washing dishes herself.
“This is a legal program to supplement American workers,” she said of the visas. “We aren’t taking jobs from anybody.”
Simply put, the companies say, Americans are not very interested in menial, shortterm work.