Jackie Eubanks and her Dallas staffing agency won the lottery — sort of.
When she couldn’t find enough workers in the U.S. to fill available jobs two years ago, Eubanks turned to the government’s temporary visa program. Her company spent more than $50,000 to apply for 50 H-2B visas, which allow workers from other countries to earn a living in the U.S. for up to three years. That year, her agency got the green light for 34.
The following year when Eubanks applied for 50 more housekeeping positions, her application was denied. But when additional slots came open earlier this year, she was able to hire 113 housekeepers and 22 front-desk workers.
Now the government is telling employers that it will reject most new requests for H-2B visas filed after Sept. 12. That’s because a 66,000-visa cap established in 1990 has already been exceeded for foreign workers looking to start seasonal work before April 2023.
Eubanks, president of Enterprise Staffing Agency, said she could have hired more than 300 workers that she wanted permits for in order to fill hotel needs.
“With our work crisis, we’re needing more workers and can’t get workers,” Eubanks said. “We can’t get the visas that bring them over here to go to work.”
The H-2 visa program allows employers to temporarily hire immigrant workers after they prove they can’t find U.S. workers to do the job. Landscaping, construction and amusement parks are some of the largest sectors using these work permits, alongside janitorial services, hospitality and forestry.
While H-2B visas technically operate on a random lottery system, the drawing closes when the quota is hit. The work permits are divided into two batches by Congress based on business employment start dates. If there were any leftover visas from the first half of the fiscal year, they could roll over to the second half, but not from one fiscal year to another.
Offering supplemental visas like the ones Eubanks received is intended to offer a temporary cushion to growing labor demands. But since 2017, they’ve become routine.
In May, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor created an additional 35,000 H-2B visas for the second half of the fiscal year. The auxiliary petitions were reserved for some recent returning H-2B workers and people from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti.
“These additional H-2B visas will help employers meet the demand for seasonal workers at this most critical time, when there is a serious labor shortage,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas in a May statement.
The additional supplement came after a similar effort in January, when the departments made 20,000 H-2B visas available for a similar group of workers.
Texas employers requested and received more H-2B visas than any other state in the U.S. in the last fiscal year.
From Oct. 1, 2020, through Sept. 30, 2021, companies in Texas asked for 22,857 temporary work visas and 18,936 were certified, according to H-2B disclosure data from the U.S. Department of Labor.
From Oct. 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022, more than 1,000 Texas companies requested nearly 4,200 more visas than were certified. But these numbers don’t provide a full picture of employer demand since once the cap is reached, employers are much less likely or don’t submit new requests.
Sectors across the U.S. are experiencing labor shortages that one economist describes as astonishing.
“In a lot of cases, businesses are struggling to hire workers as the demand has come roaring back in,” said Madeline Zavodny, a University of North Florida economy professor and a former economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “So bringing in foreign workers on a temporary basis seems like a win-win for those workers, for American businesses and consumers, as we try to figure out the new normal.”
Making supplemental visas available to provide temporary staffing relief for companies is seen by some as a palliative approach to the root issue.
“There’s such a shortage,” Eubanks said. “The overall cap needs to be raised.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce pushed Congress last year to double the cap set more than three decades ago to help employers.
“It’s antiquated. Those are old rules,” said Martin Valko, a Dallas immigration attorney and managing partner of Chavez and Valko LLP law firm. “Those do not fit with the current marketplace and with the current economy.”
The government’s announcement that H-2B visa requests already reached the cap for this half of the fiscal year set back multiple companies Valko was working with.
“We had to go and call them up and say, ‘Guess what? All of the efforts, all of the recruitment, all of the temporary labor certification, all of that is all for naught’ because we cannot go forward because the cap has been reached,” Valko said. “I mean, put yourself in that position.”
