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Businesses Are Unable to Employ Foreign Workers Due to Freeze on Visas
The Friendly Fisherman on Cape Cod is usually busy with foreign students working at this time of the year. However, due to a freeze on visas, Janet Demetri will not be able to employ the 20 or so workers this summer.
With crowds coming back, Demetri must work with nine employees for her restaurant and market. This forces her to shutter the business two times a week.
Demetri says he feels disturbed because of the amount of workload they have. “We can’t keep up once the doors are open.”
Last month, the Trump administration said it will extend “a ban on green cards issued outside the United States until the end of the year and adding many temporary work visas to the freeze, including those used heavily by technology companies and multinational corporations,” as reported by The Associated Press.
Hiring American Workers
As beach towns open, businesses are short foreign workers https://t.co/XaebBlMy88
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) July 12, 2020
According to Fox Business, the move intended to free up 525,000 jobs to those hit by the economic downturn. Supporters of immigration reform “have hailed the move,” the report added. They insisted that employers can easily find Americans who will want to “bus tables and sell souvenirs at popular tourist destinations.”
“The work that people on H-2B visas do or on J-1 summer work travel is not something that is alien to Americans,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Americans mostly do those jobs already, including “landscaping, making beds or scooping ice cream,” according to Krikorian. “The employers are just going to have to up their game in recruitment because there are 20 million people who are unemployed whom they could be drawing from,” he added.
The Center for Immigration Studies remains “animated by a unique pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision.”
The ban hit beach communities and mountain getaways up and down the East Coast the hardest. According to businesses, they want to hire Americans. However, they are “regions with tiny labor pools that are no match for the millions of tourists visiting each summer,” Fox Business reported.
Companies also struggle with the challenge of convincing unemployed workers to take a job in the hospitality industry. This is especially due to the ongoing pandemic. Other hurdles include rising housing prices and a lack of childcare.
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