Made In America By People From Abroad; Administration Boosts Migrant Worker Visas

While President Donald Trump was celebrating his self-proclaimed “Made in America” week, his Homeland Security secretary was adding another 15,000 visas for seasonal foreign workers to come to the United States to ease a crushing labor shortage.

The U.S. makes available 66,000 annual visas available for businesses to bring in nonagricultural foreign workers, half in the summer and half in the winter. But Congress in December decided that a worker can't combine the two seasons and obtain two separate visas, in effect slashing by half the number available for the peak vacation months.

“Congress gave me the discretionary authority to provide temporary relief to American businesses at risk of significant harm due to a lack of available seasonal workers,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said in a statement. “As a demonstration of the Administration’s commitment to supporting American businesses, DHS is providing this one-time increase to the congressionally set annual cap.”

Trump himself has used thousands of workers covered under that visa, the H-2B, at his myriad resorts.

Related link: In A Pickle: Big Agriculture Anxiously Awaits Administration’s Policy On Immigration

Agriculture Also Hurting

The H-2B visa covers nonagricultural workers from shrimpers in Texas to oyster bars in New England to landscapers just about everywhere, and those sectors and more have been clamoring for more warm bodies.

Some analysts believe aggressive enforcement by immigration authorities has scared off workers, mainly from Mexico.

The additional H-2B visas doesn’t even cover migrants who are vital to the country’s agricultural economy, where the quota for H-2A visas covering farmhands is full. The shortage is driving up labor costs and sending some produce and vegetable production out of states that are huge producers, such as California.

Michigan cherry farmers fear that workers who start off in Sun Belt states and move north during the summer will hurt the harvest considerably. Some strawberry farmers in California are even converting to marijuana crops.

“Follow-the-crop migrants have almost disappeared,” Philip Martin, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of California-Davis, told Fresh Plaza, a farm industry journal.