MISSING WORKERS

Months of trying to persuade the Bush administration that a cap on the number of workers it allows into the country is harming the logging and mill industries here has left the Maine congressional delegation without answers and quickly running out of time. A bill that would grandfather previous workers, introduced this week by Sen. Susan Collins, is one good idea, but the Maine industries need help faster than what the bill can deliver.

The loggers are classified as H-2B visa workers – nonagricultural, temporary employees – the number of which is capped at 66,000 nationwide and, for perhaps the first time, strictly enforced. This is a problem in part because of an improving economy, meaning more available work, and a failure to notify industries that the cap was soon to be reached last March as H2B workers took jobs in the south in early spring. Northern businesses have been caught shorthanded. As a result, Maine is facing a serious shortage of woods workers from Canada, with reported 700 jobs unfilled, and subsequently a wood shortage.

Since last month, the Maine Forest Products Council, Maine Pulp and Paper Association and Department of Labor have been working together to try to attract Maine workers to these jobs, but they haven’t been sufficiently successful, says Patrick Strauch of the MFPC. The jobs require experienced loggers who can operate mechanical harvesting equipment often in remote areas. The loss of Canadian workers, according to forestry economists Lloyd Irland and David Field, is worsening a wood-supply shortage that could reduce the amount of work at paper and sawmills, broadly affecting the state’s economy.

A key senator opposed to changes in the current H2B caps is Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, chairman of the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts. Sen. Sessions, according to his press secretary, “has serious concerns about the ineffectiveness of our immigration system and he wants to see it improved. … The senator believes we should work for a comprehensive reform of our immigration system so that it furthers our national interest and encourages compliance with the rule of law.”

Those are fair points, but there is also room for both addressing these concerns and getting workers into the woods quickly. For instance, Homeland Security, which oversees the visa process, could grant an exemption to Canadian workers who have worked here before, a part of the Collins proposal. Or it could temporarily change the designation of the workers from H-2B to H-2A, which covers agricultural workers and more closes matches the woods workers anyway. This latter idea was proposed by the Maine delegation and the delegations of other northern states but has yet to advance in Congress.

A wide range of objections to current immigration rules may be worth a much deeper examination, but while Congress is doing that it should not bar an established process that Maine industries have come to depend on to survive.