Worker visa cap imperils tourism businesses Congress fails to boost foreign labor limits

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Tourism-related businesses in the Northeast could find themselves short of summer help again next year unless Congress agrees to increase the number of work visas allotted for 2005.

That does not seem likely, however, according to Vaughn LeBlanc of the Maine Department of Labor, who expects to process H2B visa applications for 110 Maine businesses seeking 3,000 workers this year.

LeBlanc said he doubted Congress would raise the cap on temporary work visas until after the Bush administration completes an overhaul of the nation’s immigration policies.

If so, scores of tourism-related businesses in Maine and New England face another potential labor shortage next summer.

A recent attempt to increase the 66,000-visa limit by U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who represents the tourism Mecca of Cape Cod, was rejected by Congress, LeBlanc said.

Meanwhile, Congress recently agreed to allow high-tech businesses to hire 20,000 more foreign workers under the H1B program because all 65,000 visa slots were taken on the first day of the new fiscal year, according to the Associated Press.

The workers must have earned master’s degrees or higher at American universities to qualify for a work visa.

Under the current H2B visa program, the Northeast is disadvantaged because its warm season starts so much later than other parts of the nation.

Since companies can only apply for the visas four months before the workers are needed, most of the visas are long gone by March 1, when New England businesses would begin filing applications for workers to start on July 1 – the beginning of the busy tourism season.

The H2B visa application period for 2005 began on Oct. 1, the start of the new federal fiscal year. On the first day alone, 10,400 of the 66,000 visas allocated were spoken for, LeBlanc said.

Last year, the visa cap was reached on March 9, weeks before New England businesses would typically file their applications.

The good news for Maine, LeBlanc said, is that logging companies have already applied for 500 work visas, while maple syrup operations have requested about 150 tree-tappers for work in late January and February.

In order to use foreign workers under the H2B visa program, the work must be temporary and companies must show they could not find American workers to take the jobs.

The application period in Maine begins on Dec. 1, LeBlanc said.

LeBlanc suspects that some Maine tourism businesses will file applications in December, rather than April, even though there isn’t much work in the Maine tourism sector until at least June.

The peak season is July 1 through Labor Day.

However, businesses who apply for visas in December will be required to use the foreign workers in April.

Businesses can’t apply for visas early and then hold them until July 1.

“People were honest last year,” LeBlanc said, “and so the ones that were honest were penalized.”

Peter Daigle, president of the Maine Innkeepers Association, thinks the government should provide “geographic relief” to the Northeast, which always will be the last region of the country to begin its tourism season.

“There are enough jobs that are going empty that if they raised the cap to 100,000, we’d still have a shortage of workers,” Daigle said in an interview Friday.

“… These are jobs we just cannot find American workers to fill,” Daigle said.

He dismissed as myth the perception that Americans won’t take the tourism-related jobs because of low pay.

Daigle said some Maine workers don’t respond to “help wanted” ads because the work is so short-term, the housing is so expensive, particularly along the coast, and most must leave their families behind.

“We pay a lot more than a lot of retail industries,” Daigle said, “especially along the coast where there is a severe labor shortage. This is not an issue of wages.”

Tourism is Maine’s largest industry, generating almost $14 billion in sales in 2003 and employing 80,000 workers directly and another 100,000 indirectly, according to the Maine Tourism Association.

Bonnie Young is one Maine business person who plans to apply on Dec. 1 for H2B visas for four Jamaican workers.

Young said “it wouldn’t matter a bit” that she would have to start working them on April 1 because her store is only closed for six weeks in the winter.

She agrees with Daigle that the existing H2B visa program is unfair to the Northeast.

“It’s terrible because you need the workers or you’re going to have to close down the business,” said Young, who manages Ben & Bill’s Chocolate Emporium in Bar Harbor.

Young hires Mount Desert Island students and foreign students under a different visa program, but the Jamaican workers she has hired for several years can start earlier and stay later.

Like hundreds of small businesses in Maine, Young was not able to apply for H2B workers last year because the cap had been reached.

“Last summer many [Jamaican] workers came in looking for a second job, but I didn’t dare use them,” Young said.