Immigration and Emigration

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    Lack of Foreign Workers Has Seasonal Businesses Scrambling

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    SALT LAKE CITY — Tyler Holt summed up the problem his Utah landscaping business faces every year. “People who want to be in the job force want stability — if they want to work, they work full time,” he said. “Locally there’s just no workers who want to do anything seasonal.”The complaint has been echoed not only by landscapers in Utah, but also by amusement parks in Wyoming, restaurants in Rhode Island, crab trappers in Maryland, camps in Colorado and thousands of other businesses around the country that depend on seasonal workers from abroad to work lower-wage nonfarm jobs.The scramble for these temporary guest workers has been intense in recent years, as the jobless rate inched down and tensions over immigration policy ratcheted up. But this year, after the coronavirus pandemic first halted and then seriously constrained the stream of foreign workers into the United States, the competition has been particularly fierce.The Biden administration responded to frantic pleas from small businesses in the spring. It did not renew a pandemic-related suspension of the J-1 program, which provides short-term visas designed for foreign students who come to the United States to work and travel. Soon after, it raised the quota on temporary visas under the H-2B program for temporary nonagricultural workers, which are issued through a lottery.But travel restrictions, backlogs and delays at foreign consulates in approving applicants have still left businesses from Maine to California in the lurch.Mr. Holt, the chief executive of Golden Landscaping and Lawn in Orem, asked for 60 H-2B workers, hoping the team could be in place by April 1, when the season began. He struck out in the initial lottery, but was luckier the second time around, when the administration increased the quota by one-third.On July 9, Mr. Holt was overjoyed to hear that his application had been approved. But now, roughly halfway through his eight-month season, still no workers have arrived.“Nothing,” he said with disgust when asked two weeks later about an update.Mr. Holt said he had raised his normal $14-an-hour wage — by $2, then $3, then $4 and then $5 — to attract local workers. “I will give anybody a job that wants to work,” he said. The crews he has in place are working 60 to 70 hours a week to keep up with the demand.Landscapers like Mr. Holt employ more H-2B workers than any other industry — roughly half of the total approved. And their inability to get a work force in place by the start of the season has been costly.Ken Doyle, the president of All States Landscaping in Draper, Utah, said the late arrival of 27 temporary foreign workers had cost him 15 to 20 percent of his business, about $1 million.“We’re so far behind,” he said. “We’ve lost some very large accounts.”Mr. Doyle acknowledges that the work can leave blisters and an aching back. “It’s a hard job,” he said on a day when the temperature trudged past 100 degrees. “It’s hot outside. They’re digging holes for sprinklers or trees, laying sod and lifting heavy items.”Under the H-2B visa program that Mr. Doyle and Mr. Holt rely on, the number of seasonal foreign workers is ordinarily capped at 66,000 a year, split between the winter and summer season. Veteran workers, who returned year after year, used to be exempted from the total, but Congress halted that practice in 2017 as the immigration debate got heated. The next year, the government instituted a lottery system that injected a new layer of uncertainty on top of a frustrating process.“It’s quite the gamble if you’re going to be a viable business,” Mr. Doyle said.Kyan Chase, 15, works at Palace Playland in Old Orchard Beach. Of the labor shortage, he said: “It’s pretty good for me. I can get a job anywhere I want.”Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesPrograms for temporary guest workers have long come under attack from several corners. Labor groups and immigration critics argue that it robs American workers of jobs and depresses wages. And every year, there are disturbing examples in which foreign workers are exploited by employers, cheated out of pay or living in squalid conditions.Many employers counter that people don’t understand the peculiarities of the seasonal labor market and changed attitudes, particularly about manual work.“Fifteen, 20 years ago we were able to get local summer kids in high school or college,” Mr. Holt said. “Those workers are just not there anymore. It’s easier to do other things than hard labor for eight to nine hours a day.”Mr. Doyle spent nearly $30,000 advertising for workers as far away as Nevada and got no response, he said. For the last year, he has had a 20-foot trailer parked outside his office, emblazoned with a sign proclaiming: “NOW HIRING. WALK-INS WELCOME.”“I had two people drop in all year,” he said.Higher wages could encourage more American-born workers to apply to these jobs, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University Law School. But he argues that in every labor market, there are difficult, unpleasant, low-paid jobs with no opportunity for advancement — like agricultural work or meatpacking — that are considered less desirable both for economic and for cultural reasons.Some of the attitudes toward jobs, particularly in the service sectors, are changing, he said, but “we haven’t quite understood yet the impact of pandemic.”Temporary guest workers have also gotten entangled in broader and more bitter arguments over immigration. There is a widespread misconception, Mr. Chishti said, that all foreign workers are eager to settle in the United States.“A lot of workers don’t necessarily want to come and live here forever,” he said. “They want to work legally and travel back and forth. Their life in Mexico, for example, may be better than life in a U.S. city.”In the meantime, employers are struggling. Small resort towns often depend on international seasonal workers because their population isn’t sufficient to fill all of the suddenly available slots at hotels, restaurants, ice cream shops or ski slopes that serve the hordes of tourists who appear and then vanish.“We just don’t have enough local workers to be able to support the economy as it needs to be in the summertime,” said Jen Hayes, who is the J-1 visa program liaison for Old Orchard Beach, a coastal town south of Portland, Maine.Workers on J-1 or H-2B visas generally make up about 10 to 14 percent of the seasonal work force in Maine.Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesHistorically, the town has had anywhere from 650 to 740 international student workers in the summer — from countries including Turkey, Romania and Russia — but Ms. Hayes estimated that there were only 125 to 150 as of late July. A meet-and-greet at the start of the summer that typically bustles with activity drew only a handful of people.The labor shortage has forced some businesses to limit their hours or close for an extra day a week.Exorbitant housing costs in vacation-friendly enclaves — whether in the Hamptons, in Ketchum, Idaho, or in Provincetown, Mass. — further shrink the pool of available workers, foreign or domestic.In Maine, where the economy relies heavily on tourism and out-of-state visitors, workers on J-1 or H-2B visas generally make up about 10 to 14 percent of the seasonal work force, said Greg Dugal, the director of government affairs at HospitalityMaine, a trade group.But this year, the state will be lucky to receive half the usual number, Mr. Dugal said, adding that many who were approved for the summer arrived later than usual because of processing delays.“The fact remains that we had a worker shortage prior to the pandemic,” he said, and “we have a worse worker shortage after the pandemic for the same reason and a lot of other reasons.”Patricia Cohen More

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    Utah Farm Draws a Rare Breed: The American Shepherd

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    DIXIE NATIONAL FOREST, Utah — “The object is to keep ’em grazing,” Scott Stubbs said as he looked over the 1,470 ewes and lambs chewing up Castle Valley’s dandelions, clover and grasses. “Get them full, which makes them fat.”Mr. Stubbs, a fifth-generation sheep farmer in southern Utah, did not expect to be giving a hands-on shepherding seminar this summer, but he was stuck. He needed a second experienced herder, and the one who was supposed to arrive in the spring from Peru did not get approval for a special agricultural visa. Now backlogs at some foreign passport offices and American consulates — compounded by the pandemic — were delaying a replacement.That’s why Mr. Stubbs last month ended up hiring Duane Rogers, a type of worker rarer than a blue lamb in these parts: an American-born beginner who was eager to herd sheep.Labor shortages are common this summer, especially in Utah, where the unemployment rate is 2.7 percent. The Marriott in Cedar City did not have enough maids to offer daily housekeeping, and the Denny’s outside of Beaver had a sign on the door asking customers to be patient with a short-handed staff. But the predicament that Mr. Stubbs and farmers like him are facing is of longer standing and more severe.“Nobody wants this type of work,” Mr. Stubbs said of herding and farm labor. And most American-born workers haven’t wanted it in a while — at least at the wages that most farmers say they can afford. That is why more than 200,000 temporary foreign farm workers, mostly from Mexico, were allowed into the United States last year to pick cherries, tomatoes and tobacco or to tend livestock. The number of visas issued has more than tripled since 2011, and it increased in 2020 despite the pandemic, after food and agricultural workers were characterized as part of the essential work force.Mr. Stubbs, 54, started using the agricultural visa program, known as H-2A, eight years ago. Through an agency, he hired a Peruvian, Ronal Leon Parejas, who is still with him.Before then, aside from family members or the occasional high school student who would pitch in for a few weeks, the only people in recent years willing to herd sheep were Native Americans or undocumented immigrants, Mr. Stubbs said. This year, the Navajo herder who had been working for him needed a knee operation. At 68, he probably wouldn’t be coming back.“You put a small flock out, but you can’t get labor,” said Mr. Stubbs, who raises his flock for both wool and meat. “It’s putting a hurt on.”Mr. Stubbs, who was 5 or 6 years old when his grandfather taught him how to move a flock from meadow to creek on the federal forest land where his family has had grazing rights since the 1800s, knows it is a hard and lonely job. His first month herding alone was after eighth grade. “I thought I would die,” he said, even though his mother drove from their farm nearly 20 miles away each day to check on him. “I lost 30 pounds in 30 days.”A herder has to stay with the sheep 24 hours a day through the roughly 10-month period on the open range, in sun and rain, hail and snow, whether temperatures climb toward 100 degrees or drop below zero. The workday begins at sunup and ends at sundown, although there may be nights when you need to help the guard dogs scare off a coyote or a mountain lion. There are no weekends or holidays off.The H-2A program has been criticized for low wages and lack of worker protections. For workers under the visa program, the pay is set by the government, and has increased in recent years. In Utah, it is $1,728 a month plus transportation, room and board. In this case, the room is a 14-by-8-foot sheep wagon that has a bed, a wood-fire stove, a gas grill and a cooler. Mr. Stubbs delivers requested food — eggs, bacon, sandwich meat, bread, potato chips, cookies, soda and cans of chile and corn — every few days, along with water.And that is the deal that Mr. Rogers accepted three weeks ago. “I’m grateful that Scott gave me a chance,” he said.Mr. Rogers prepared dinner in his trailer near the grazing area where he herds sheep.A herder has to stay with the sheep 24 hours a day through the nine-month grazing period.Marty Stubbs, who is training Mr. Rogers, roped a lamb that was showing signs of a possible injury.Mr. Rogers, left, assisted Mr. Stubbs with the injured lamb.Mr. Rogers pulled on his tan leather gloves. “I love being in the mountains, and I don’t mind being alone,” he said. His wife, whom he met a few years ago on Western Match, an online dating service for cowboys and “country folk,” lives in South Texas with his stepson and two step-granddaughters. He arrived in Utah with five dogs and his father’s old saddle.At 58, Mr. Rogers has tried his hand at various jobs. He grew up in Hayden, Colo., where his father owned a small farm and raised some cattle and sheep. He served in the military for 12 years and did a tour in Panama before joining the National Guard. In addition to herding cattle and working as a ranch hand, he has driven trucks, maintained highways, worked in construction, plowed snow and guarded women and children who had been arrested at the border and locked up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers — a job he said he hated because of the conditions.During a long rehabilitation after a truck wreck in 2017, Mr. Rogers said, he spent a lot of time thinking about what he wanted to do. He had looked after small flocks of sheep in enclosed areas, but the idea of working a large open-range herd had always exerted a magnetic pull. He was fascinated by the nomadic life, and had watched dozens of documentaries about it. And he was excited to train his dogs to herd sheep.He was unemployed when he saw the advertisement on the state’s job listing site and applied.“I like cattle, but sheep are a lot more entertaining,” and a lot smarter than people give them credit for, he said. “The lambs do some of the funniest things. In the morning, when they’re feeling good, they’ll climb up on the rocks and play king of the mountain.”The sheep were offering a symphony of guttural bleats punctuated with hollow tongs from bells dangling round their necks as Mr. Rogers and the dogs directed them toward a noonday water break. As the ewes and lambs shuffled forward, they kicked up swarms of grasshoppers that can strip a green field faster than any herd. It is one of several travails plaguing Western farmers this season, along with extreme heat and a prolonged drought that are shrinking harvests and killing off grazing land.The delay in hiring a second herder provided Mr. Stubbs with another challenge. Because he had no one to take the sheep to graze, he had to keep them on the farm, feeding them bales of hay he might otherwise have sold.Over the past few weeks, his son Marty has been helping train Mr. Rogers to herd, so he has not been around to help his father with farm work or tend to his own sheepshearing business. There are many days, Mr. Stubbs said, when he and his teenage daughter ended up working till midnight.One morning, Marty Stubbs caught sight of a small white lamb that wasn’t using his hind left leg. He rode after him, threw up a loop of rope and in a single swing lassoed his back legs. He jumped off a chestnut horse named Trigger and held down the lamb, pushing his left knee against the animal’s stomach. He examined the hind hoof, poking with a knife to loosen a stuck rock or thorn.Mr. Rogers took a brown bottle of penicillin and a large syringe out of his saddle bag.“How many CC’s you want?” he asked.“Six,” Marty replied.He closed his knife, took the needle and jabbed it into the lamb’s hindquarter and then marked the animal’s back with an orange line in chalk. He lifted his knee, and the lamb hobbled away.“If you know where they’re going, it’s OK,” Marty said of keeping track of the sheep. “The problem is if you don’t know where they are and you have to find them.”Knowing where the flock is likely to head, though, is something that only comes through experience. Mr. Parejas said it wasn’t until his fourth year that he felt truly comfortable.His herd was about 10 miles east of Mr. Rogers’s, and he was getting ready to move them across Highway 143, through thick clusters of pinyon pine and juniper, spruce and white quaking aspens, up Haycock Mountain. As the sheep fanned out across the road — they have the right of way — lines of cars and trucks backed up on either side of the double yellow line, their passengers alternately irritated and enchanted by the woolly procession.Sheep herded by Ronal Leon Parejas, a Peruvian herder, crossed Highway 143. Mr. Parejas, left, has not been able to return to Peru to visit his 4-year-old son since February 2020, before the pandemic hit.“It’s very hard and very lonely,” he said through a translator. “I miss my family.”Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesFor Mr. Rogers, left, the idea of working a large open-range herd has always exerted a magnetic pull. Mr. Parejas, 32, has not been able to return to his own small farm in Peru or his 4-year-old son since February 2020, before the pandemic hit. He hopes to visit in December, when the season ends, as long as it doesn’t interfere with his efforts to get a green card — a prize that would enable him to work and live in the United States without restrictions.“It’s very hard and very lonely,” he said through a translator. “I miss my family.” Still, it is better now than during his first couple of years, when he lacked a cellphone with WhatsApp and Facebook to keep in touch.He remembers his first night trying to sleep in the desert, when he heard a coyote howl. “I almost cried,” Mr. Parejas said.Now he is trying to help his nephew get an H-2A visa so he can also work for Mr. Stubbs. He said that he could probably earn as much if not more an hour in Peru, but that getting an employer back home to pay what he owes can be a trial. Working here delivers a dependable paycheck, he said.Mr. Rogers, too, appreciates the reliable paychecks and the fact that he has no expenses during the season and can bank his entire wage. He hopes to start paying down a large debt.Even so, he says that for him, the earnings are secondary. “Money isn’t everything, living is everything,” he said. “All you leave behind is your story, and this is a good story to tell my grandkids.” More

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    How It Looks to Live in N.Y.C. During a Pandemic on $100 a Week

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    Ms. Galán’s home is small, but happy. Christopher, 11, Mia, 7, and Ian, 1, get along. The older children help keep the space tidy. The youngest has kept them giggling during the long year they’ve spent together indoors. Before the pandemic, Ms. Galán worked at a dry cleaner in the Bronx, earning about $350 per […] More

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    Covid and Travel: Why an Estimated 100,000 Americans Abroad Face Passport Problems

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    Consular appointments for U.S. citizens overseas are nearly impossible to come by as many embassies, plagued by Covid restrictions and staff reductions, remain all but closed. Yona Shemesh, 24, was born in Los Angeles, but he moved to Israel with his family at age 9. In July 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was raging, he booked a ticket to Los Angeles to visit his grandparents in June 2021, knowing that he would have nearly an entire year to renew his American passport, which had long since expired.Eight months later, he was still trying to get an appointment at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to do just that.About 9 million U.S. citizens currently live abroad, and as the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel finally appears, immigration lawyers estimate more than 100,000 can’t get travel documents to return to the United States.Despite the State Department making headway on a massive backlog of passport applications in the early months of the pandemic, many consulates and embassies abroad, plagued by Covid-19 restrictions and staffing reductions, remain closed for all but emergency services. Travel is restarting, but for American expats who had a baby abroad in the past year or saw their passport expire during the pandemic, elusive appointments for documents are keeping them grounded.“It’s a real mess,” said Jennifer Minear, an immigration attorney and the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It’s a giant, multilayered onion of a problem and the reduction of staff as a result of Covid at the consular posts has really thrown the State Department for a loop.”Michael Wildes, the managing partner of the law firm Wildes & Weinberg, P.C., which specializes in immigration law, estimates that the number of stranded Americans abroad is in the hundreds of thousands.“Our offices have been inundated,” he said. “We’ve been getting at least 1,200 calls a week on this, which is about 50 percent more than last year. The problem is more robust than people realize, and this isn’t how a 21st-century society should work.”Ballooning backlog, endless delaysIn Israel alone, the U.S. Embassy has a passport backlog of 15,000 applications, according to The Jerusalem Post. American Citizens Abroad, an advocacy organization for U.S. expats, sent an official request to the State Department in October 2020 to prioritize Americans’ access to consular services abroad, “but people are still experiencing delays,” said the organization’s executive director, Marylouise Serrato.In Mexico, which is believed to have more American expats than any other country, a recent search on the appointment database for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City showed zero available appointments for passport services, even with emergency circumstances (appointments from July onward have not yet been released).At the U.S. Embassy in London, the availability of appointments for both in-person passport renewals and obtaining an official record of a child’s claim to U.S. citizenship, known as a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, plummeted when Britain went back into lockdown last fall. Amanda Brill, a London-based U.S. immigration attorney, said that since November, appointments have been nonexistent for both. “You can imagine that if you’re a U.S. citizen and you’ve had a baby in the past six months, it is frustrating at best and incredibly stressful for citizens returning to America,” she said.And as of early April, 75 percent of U.S. consulates abroad remained at least partially closed. The State Department will not release numbers on how many Americans are awaiting passport appointments around the world, but the size of the backlog for interviews for approved U.S. immigration visas — which are also handled by the State Department and have been affected by the same slowdown — gives a sense of the challenge. In January 2020, there was a backlog of 75,000 immigrant visas for those wishing to come to the United States; as of February 2021, the backlog had ballooned to 473,000.Vicious mix of politics and the pandemicState Department officials would not offer specifics on wait times for appointments and passport services at their embassies, but they said in a statement that Americans should expect delays when applying for nonemergency passport or citizenship services, and that operating hours vary significantly between embassies, as each is facing different Covid-19 restrictions.Stateside, adult U.S. citizens can renew an expired passport by mail, a process which is currently taking 10 to 12 weeks, according to State Department officials. But in many countries abroad, citizens must apply at a U.S. embassy or consulate for the same service. Even in the countries where U.S. passport renewals are available by mail, travel documents for minors or for those whose passports expired before the age of 18 still need to be requested in person.The situation, said the immigration attorney Jessica Smith Bobadilla, was created by a vicious mix of politics and the pandemic. “The combination of Trump-era travel bans and the Covid-19 restrictions still in place seriously impacted the visa and passport-processing time frames and procedures by the Department of State like never before in recent history,” Ms. Bobadilla said.Appointments for saleMr. Shemesh, the dual citizen living in Israel, spent months logging onto the U.S. Embassy’s website daily at 10 a.m., which he heard on Facebook was the moment that appointments were released each day, to try to grab one. He repeatedly walked the two blocks from his Jerusalem apartment to the U.S. Embassy to ask the guards if they knew of any openings, and he sent multiple emails to consular officials. Everyone told him he simply needed to wait. Finally, with the deadline for his trip looming, he heard about a third-party broker in Israel who promised he could book him an appointment within weeks in exchange for $450.The State Department prohibits such practices, but the issue of bootleggers selling access to U.S. embassies is widespread enough that on Jan. 14, the Bureau of Consular Affairs issued a notice to registered passport courier companies warning them of consequences for pay-to-play offerings for appointments. David Alwadish, the founder of ItsEasy Passport & Visa, a passport-and-visa-expediting service, said that many of them are so small that they’re nearly impossible to track.“Since there is an online appointment system, anybody can log on, stockpile these appointments and resell them,” he said. “In the United States, they can be sold for $200 or $250, but out of the country they can charge much more.”Mr. Shemesh got the broker’s phone number and transferred the money, and in one day, he had a confirmed appointment.“I tried for eight months to get an appointment, and it was really a bummer because my money is something I have to work hard for. I paid more to renew my passport than I did on the ticket to Los Angeles. It felt like blackmail.”Desperate Americans in other countries have considered paying for other services, as well.Conner Gorry, an American journalist who lives in Cuba, tried for weeks to renew her expiring U.S. passport and considered chartering a plane from Havana to Miami where she could renew her passport by mail.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesConner Gorry, 51, an American journalist who lives in Cuba, spent several frantic weeks trying to renew her expiring passport earlier this year. The U.S. Embassy in Havana is closed for all but emergency services. For six weeks, she tried to book an appointment, and received no response. Ms. Gorry grew so stressed that she developed gastritis, and at one point, she contemplated spending more than $13,000 to charter a plane from Havana to Miami, where she knew she would be able to renew her passport by mail.She eventually found a flight out of Havana, and flew to the U.S. with one week left on her passport. She is unsure of when she will return to Cuba. The situation, she said, made her furious.“The Covid thing is one thing. But the U.S. has citizens all over the world, and a diplomatic corps all over the world. What are they doing to protect and attend to us?”Dayna and Brian Lee, originally from Toronto, turned to an immigration lawyer when they could not book U.S. passport appointments for their infant twins born in New York City.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDocuments for American citizens within the United States are also getting stuck in the backlog. When Dayna and Brian Lee, who are Tony Award-winning producers of “Angels in America,” had twin baby girls in early April, the bureaucratic headaches started before they even brought their newborn daughters from the hospital to their home in New York City, where they have lived for several years.The couple is originally from Toronto and their daughters, Emmy and Ella, are eligible for dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship but are currently without passports from either country. The infants must have American passports first so their parents can travel with them to Canada, where the girls will be able to also receive their Canadian passports. But for weeks after the girls were born, Mr. and Mrs. Lee were unable to book appointments at any U.S. passport office within a three-hour drive of New York City. They ended up turning to an immigration lawyer for help.“It’s so inexplicably stressful, mixed up with the overwhelming joy of having these two beautiful lives in front of you,” Mr. Lee said. “But we’ve made the decision that come hell or high water, we will be with our families this summer.”Elizabeth Goss, an immigration attorney based in Boston, said she expects delays and scheduling headaches for both visas and U.S. passports to last another year.“It’s like a cruise ship that needs to readjust,” she said. “It’s not a speedboat.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More

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    Justice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. Workers

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. WorkersThe complaint, which targets the company’s hiring of immigrants on temporary visas, opens a new front in Washington’s battle against Big Tech.Outside the headquarters of Facebook, which the Justice Department accused of favoring immigrants over Americans when hiring.Credit…Jason Henry for The New York TimesBy More