Immigration advocates have long stated that the US needs more work-based visas, whether it be for highly skilled positions or low skilled positions.
For the past few years, the US has run out of the bread and butter h1b visa well before the fiscal year ended (actually, well before the fiscal year even started). This left US employers in a lurch because they could not employ skilled and well educated US worker on an h1b petition until the next fiscal year, leaving them open to the likelihood of offshoring their skilled labor needs. This year was the most extreme in h1b history; the US ran out of its h1b visas on the same day they were finally open for filing after almost a full year.
Unfortunately, this same situation is unfolding for the h2b non-agriculture visa. The h2b seasonal worker visa. There are 66,000 of these visas allotted every fiscal year in order for businesses to fill their seasonal labor needs, normally with low skilled workers who are only needed during peak times of the year. Think of landscapers, roofers, ski lodge workers, shrimp harvesters, and the like.
In order to get the h2b visa, the employer needs to advertise the job openings and interview everyone who meets the job requirements. They also need to pay the prevailing wage for the positions. If, after hiring all of the US workers who apply for the jobs, there are still job openings for these seasonal positions, then the employer can file an h2b petition for foreign workers to temporarily fill these seasonal positions.
I have consulted with many small US employers who uniformly inform me they cannot find enough US workers to fill these positions. Few people born in the US seem to want to haul heavy rock around for eight hours a day on landscaping projects. So having an h2b visa available is an inconvenient option many seasonal employers use.
So many in fact that these h2b visas run out every year, leaving many seasonal employers without any US workers and without any legal foreign workers to fill their seasonal labor needs.
In order to attempt to fairly provide for the diverse seasonal needs around the country, the h2b visas are split into two allotments of 33,000 visas. The first allotment for seasonal positions which ran from October 2007 to April 1, 2008 was depleted as of September 27, 2007. All petitions which were received that day were put into a lottery to determine which ones would be chosen for the remaining visas of the 33,000 originally available.
The second group of 33, 000 h2b visas are for positions which begin on April 1, 2008 — the summer positions. Small employers should be preparing to file these h2b positions soon.
This visa shortage has worsened this year, unfortunately. Every returning h1b workers must be counted against the visa cap, unlike in previous years. Most employers prefer to use returning workers since the relationship, performance standards and expectations have been previously established. This requirement of counting returning workers against the cap effectively reduces the number of h2b visas available by a substantial number, further exacerbating the visa shortage problem.
Congress is aware of this problem. The Senate and House are both working on legislation which addresses this shortage; you can read up to the minute details about attempts to resolve this visa shortage at http://www.savesmallbusiness.org/ The House has 93 co-sponsors to a bill named the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act of 2007.
Our need to fix our immigration laws did not die when Congress failed to act on this need last year.
Peace,
Elizabeth Streefland
