H-2B or Not H-2B

The short-term health of a significant portion of Maine’s logging industry will shortly be determined by the Department of Homeland Security. The financial importance of the situation requires a swift answer from Secretary Tom Ridge, who should recognize that the national security he is working to improve has little to do with the presence of longtime Canadian woods workers in northern Maine.

Canadians have cut trees in the Maine woods for as long as anyone has been paying attention to the border, and though they have more recently belonged to the visa classification H-2B, which caps the national total of immigrant workers at 66,000, they have not been prevented from entering the United States before because the cap was routinely ignored. Now, with national security at issue, the cap is no longer ignored and these workers face similar difficulties as Canadian nurses, who have also worked here for years and are now finding it difficult to get across the border.

The numbers on the woods workers, according to Maine woods associations, are these: The logging industry has 700 job openings that are typically filled by Canadians who, unless employed, will reduce the wood harvest 38 percent across six counties, causing a reduction in the supply of sawlogs and of pulp to paper mills. The associations assert that this will directly affect 3,000 jobs and cost many hundreds of millions of dollars. Keeping out these loggers, many of whom come here year after year, does nothing to enhance security.

Maine’s senators have asked Sec-retary Ridge to grant what is known as “temporary parole” to the loggers so that they might immediately begin work even as Congress contemplates various immigration reforms. Secretary Ridge has granted parole to workers in other cases but he has done so individually; asking him to grant this status to a group would be a first. The senators are still waiting for a response from the secretary’s office.

But whether individually or as a group, the loggers meet the parole standard of providing a “significant public benefit,” by being allowed in. The fragile condition of the timber industry and the fading paper industry in Maine make any significant disruption a substantial public problem and a solution a significant benefit. And the secretary could avoid setting precedent by observing that loggers, unlike all other H-2B temporary, nonagricultural workers, actually fit more closely with the H-2A immigrant agricultural employees, which do not have a cap. Part of the reform should consider changing the loggers’ designation to the agricultural visa classification.

Meanwhile, the work needs to get done in northern Maine and no amount of advertising in the state has turned up the skilled work force the logging companies are seeking. Secretary Ridge can help – if he acts soon.