A Shortage of Seasonal Workers Is Feared

As the summer approaches, many American companies have started their seasonal worker recruitment process, but when employers went to the US Departments of Labor and Homeland Security to submit their visa applications for their foreign employees, they found out that this year's 66,000 limit for the H-2B visa, a visa for temporary foreign workers, was already reached, putting many of the businesses in jeopardy. The Congress is now being pressed by companies and groups to relax this limit for this year and increase the number of H-2B visas, but with the domestic employment record still not looking good and many continuing blaming outsourcing of US jobs overseas, legislators are divided on this issue. On one side of the debate, it is the companies needing foreign workers asserting that these temporary jobs pay very little and guarantee few or no benefits and therefore Americans do not want them anyway; on the other side, however, are people who think that these companies have not made enough efforts to bring domestic labor force into their business and just want to hire cheaper foreign labor. Several bills have been submitted to the Congress calling for more H-2B visas, but with a strict timeline for visa processing, even if any of these bills passes, employers dependent on seasonal foreign workers, such as landscaping contractors, hoteliers and food processors, are still likely to encounter difficulty, and even "crises" for their businesses, as some have described. – YaleGlobal