Many business owners employ legal foreign workers for their seasonal or intermittent job openings. These people, whom their employers describe as serious and very skilled, and who have been working with them for many year, now find it hard to do the same thing because of the complicated process of obtaining an H-2B visa. This is to the detriment of both employer and employee, having the greatest impact or the former rather than on the latter, as many businesses, such as resorts or hospital cannot function without these legal immigrants.



One of the recent immigration proposals drawn up by the White House refers to allowing illegal immigrants to obtain the three-year Z-visa and giving them the possibility to continue their work after having paid fines in the total amount of $ 3,500, as well as the same amount of money for each renewal. Moreover, after these illegal immigrants have passed background checks and have been awarded the Z-visas, they should be given the possibility to become legal residents and therefore eligible for citizenship, but only upon payment of up to $ 10,000 in penalties. However, the White House proposals doesn’t allow temporary workers or Z-visa holders to bring their families to the US. This proposal also came up with a new guest program for temporary workers, which represented to way to citizenship in itself, for all illegal immigrants.

The United States Senate passed a bill in 2006, which is pretty much similar to the White House proposal, but it differs in that illegal immigrants had to fulfill two very important conditions in order to become permanent residents and eventually citizens. These were the period of time they had to have spent working in the United States, which was of at least five years, and the obligation to learn English. The Senate bill demanded that those illegal immigrants who had been in the country for less than two years should leave. The same bill required immigrants who had been in the country for more than two years, but less than five, to file an application of return at an entry point at the border.

Many firms bring legal immigrants to the United States on H-2B visas and they are now denied the possibility to rely on seasonal workers by the US Department of Labor. The H-2B visa has been created to come to the aid of those employers that have intermittent or seasonal needs and who need to hire temporary workers in order to increase their labor force. Such employers include owners of restaurants, resorts, landscaping companies, or property management firms. Panic has been created among most business owners, as the US Department of Labor has denied the H-2B visas for seasonal workers. Their only hope is that their petitions to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services be approved. Even so, it would take longer than the usual for foreign workers to arrive in the United States, and in the mean time employers would be left without the people who make their business run.

Most business owners who are in need of seasonal workers agree that the H-2B visa is a wonderful program, as it fills jobs that can’t normally be filled in the areas where the labor pool is missing. Employers who want to hire foreign workers must obtain a temporary labor certification from the State Workforce Agency in their area. All business owners must proceed carefully and start this process early, as petitions should be evaluated at the State Workforce Agency in no more than thirty days, but it known that the actual evaluation can take even three times longer. Furthermore, upon completion of the evaluation, petitions are forwarded to US Department of Labor, which should communicate an answer to the petitioners within forty-five days, but they are also known to have taken a whole lot longer, claiming that the number of petitions for foreign seasonal workers has increased substantially.

The good part is that most petitions that have been initially denied are approved when the petitioners appeal. However, this takes a lot of time and affects the beginning of the season, so all business owners should start processing early.