Your Government at Work
Your Government at Work
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Bill Clark/Zuma Press
Another great moment in government technology: On New Year’s Day, the Department of Labor’s online portal crashed as U.S. employers submitted tens of thousands of requests to bring in temporary foreign workers. Most will be disappointed because America still doesn’t allow enough guest workers to meet demand.
H-2B visas enable businesses that can’t find qualified Americans to bring in foreigners for temporary or seasonal non-agricultural work. And on Jan. 1, Labor began accepting applications for H-2Bs for summer 2019 on a first-come, first-serve basis. Employers are so eager for workers they submitted more than 97,800 requests in the first five minutes of 2019. That shattered last year’s record of 81,000.
But Congress guarantees only 66,000 H-2Bs annually, divided between the summer and winter seasons, and there are already nearly three requests pending for each available visa for this summer. For the past two years Congress has also failed to reauthorize a returning worker program that allowed some past recipients of H-2B visas to work another season with the old boss without contributing to the cap number.
In 2017 and 2018, Congress added a provision to annual spending bills that allowed the Department of Homeland Security to issue tens of thousands of additional H-2Bs as it saw fit. But DHS issued only 15,000 more last summer.
We wish the feds could operate a website, but the larger problem is that the U.S. economy is creating more jobs than there are American workers to fill. Democrats now have a chance to show they can do something about the visa mess that Republicans failed to fix.
Appeared in the January 5, 2019, print edition.
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