Keeping Wages Down
Labor unions wonder why companies insist they need the visas, because the unemployment rate remains high. In fact, only about half of high school and college students — the type of people well-suited for unskilled seasonal work — are employed, a near-record low. At the same time, a July report by the Census Bureau found that three in four Americans who graduate from college with a degree in science, technology, engineering or math did not take a job in a related field.
Even so, unions haven’t pressed the issue and have tried to trade increases in guest worker visas for other priorities, such as more green cards for immigrants who might become citizens and then join unions.
Maryland lawmakers have been sympathetic to their seafood producers and resorts, which depend on seasonal workers coming from foreign countries under temporary visas. ROD LAMKEY JR./AFP/GETTY IMAGES
“In each of these cases, both for the high- tech workers and the seasonal ones, there’s no one organized to oppose it,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank in Washington. “You have huge multinational corporations with more money than God on one side and scattered workforces that are disorganized in opposition.”
In exchange for supporting last year’s Senate measure, the unions secured language in the bill that would have required employers to first try to hire U.S. workers and to pay their guest workers the prevailing wage for their occupations. Eugenio Villasante, a spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, says unions took the best deal they could get. “There’s such a need for reform to allow people who’ve been here for years to live in peace and continue working that unions were willing to compromise on guest workers,” he said.
Russell Harrison, a lobbyist for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which opposes H-1B high-tech visas, says his members opposed the increases in the Senate bill but were enthused about making it easier for foreign doctoral students to live here.
Most congressional Republicans want to increase both. In 2012, the House passed a bill that would have increased the availability of green cards for foreigners studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the United States. And last year the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would have increased the annual cap on the H-1B high-tech visas beyond where the Senate’s immigration bill would go, to 235,000. Neither advanced because Senate Democrats insisted on coupling increases in guest worker visas with a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
In 2014, Maryland GOP Rep. Andy Harris, whose Eastern Shore district needs workers for its seafood and resort industries, proposed increasing the number of seasonal hotel and restaurant worker visas by exempting from the cap workers who return year after year. Although his bill has not advanced, business advocates plan to keep pushing. “We have hoteliers in peak season that make every effort to hire U.S. workers but aren’t able to attract them,” says Vanessa Sinders, senior vice president at the American Hotel & Lodging Association. “I think there is support on both sides of the aisle” to increase the visas.
Better pay might help employers lure American workers, but employers have fought to limit increases for those on visas, something set by the Labor Department. When the department tried to increase pay for seasonal guest workers last year, employers successfully fought back. Led by the Edgartown, Mass., hotelier Island Holdings, which operates the beachside Winnetu Inn Resort on Martha’s Vineyard, they protested to a Labor Department appeals board that the pay increase — nearly 24 percent in the case of Island Holdings’ housekeepers — would have caused some of them to shut down. The board agreed, forcing Labor to agree to more specific rules about when it can raise guest worker pay.
Meanwhile, employers have the upper hand in convincing lawmakers of the need for more H-1B technology visas. Todd Schulte, executive director of Fwd.us, a lobbying group formed by Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, says it’s foolish for lawmakers to say no. “We’re saying to educated people, ‘Go start the next Silicon Valley, but don’t do it here.’ ”
It’s a powerful argument that could resonate in 2015 as Obama finds himself dealing with a Republican Congress. Instead of Democrats trying to persuade Republicans to do something about illegal immigrants, it’ll be Republicans trying to persuade Democrats to accept an immigration bill that doesn’t go nearly as far as the president’s party would like — while assuaging conservatives by tying increases in guest workers to tougher border enforcement.