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Provincetown businesses shut out of H-2B visa program
Banner Daily Update Sat. Jan. 5
By Pru Sowers
Banner Staff
PROVINCETOWN – Local business owners are scrambling to find summer workers in the wake of Thursday’s announcement by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that the cap on H-2B summer workers had been reached.
A rough survey showed that none of Provincetown’s businesses applying for permission to bring in foreign summer workers had received the required federal labor certification that would have allowed them to submit paperwork to the USCIS, the last stop in the visa application process. As a result, business owners said they would be forced to seek an alternate labor force.
The best case projected by several managers and owners is that their labor and training costs will go up. The worst case, they said, is that they will have to curtail the hours they are open for business or not open at all.
“Everybody is in the same boat, all over the Cape and Nantucket and [Martha’s] Vineyard. People won’t be open as much. We’ve all become so dependent on the foreign workers,” said Candy Collins-Boden, executive director of the Provincetown Chamber of Commerce.
“We’ll probably shut the restaurant down, that’s for one, maybe all summer,’ said Fred Sateriale Jr., general manager of the Cape Inn, which employed 16 H-2B workers and seven college students from Europe under the J1 visa program last summer. “We have to keep the rooms clean and keep the grounds and maintenance up. That’s the most important thing in a motel.”
The writing on the H-2B wall had been apparent last month when Congress refused to consider extending an exemption in the visa program that would have allowed returning workers not to be counted against the 33,000-summer visa cap. However, several business owners were taken by surprise on Thursday when the USCIS announced via press release that it would not accept any visa applications after January 2 because it had already received enough requests to meet that cap.
Most of the Provincetown businesses that normally apply for H-2B visas had begun the paperwork, which requires they apply first to the Massachusetts Department of Workforce Development, which requires employers to advertise locally for workers. If not enough applicants turn up, as is usually the case for Provincetown and much of Cape Cod, the state turns the application over to the federal Department of Labor, which issues a labor certificate to qualified employers. That certificate then has to be included in a visa application package that employers send to the USCIS.
Many, if not most of the Provincetown businesses applying for H-2B visas had submitted the paperwork but had not received labor certification from the DOL. As a result, they are now precluded from submitting an application to the USCIS, which means they will not be able to import any foreign workers under the H-2B program.
“Nobody in Provincetown had gotten the DOL labor certificate that I know of. It’s a killer, an absolute killer,” said Joy McNulty, owner of the Lobster Pot restaurant.
McNulty said she is starting to look for workers in New York and Boston through a network of contacts. She hopes not to have to use a hiring agency to find the 30-plus workers to replace the team of Jamaicans she has used each summer, most of them returning staff who did not have to be trained.
For more on this story see the Jan. 10 Provincetown Banner.
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Jan 3rd, 2008