Employers Voice Annual False Lament About Labor Shortage
By Joe Guzzardi
People may be fleeing New York and Chicago for sunny Florida, but not many are looking for jobs once they arrive. Or so goes the claim. The Census Bureau identified Florida, whose population between 2021 and 2022 increased by 1.9 percent to 22,244,823, as the nation’s fastest growing state. New arrivals, which include the 3.1 million that relocated to Florida during the last decade, were unevenly distributed among the state’s 67 counties. A third of the newcomers settled in Orange, Hillsborough, Lee, Polk and Palm Beach.
Despite so many new residents, CareerSource Palm Beach County officials said that their analysis of 2023 H-2B foreign worker visa applications showed that a record 52 employers, including hotels, clubs and resorts, are seeking to bring people from other countries to fill an also record number of positions, 3,123. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and other ritzy golf clubs are among the visa petitioners.
Companies filing requests this year include The Breakers in Palm Beach, BallenIsles Country Club also in Palm Beach Gardens and The Polo Club of Boca Raton. Listed too are 111 positions for the Mar-a-Lago club that serves as the former president’s main residence and another 51 jobs for Trump’s golf clubs in Jupiter and suburban West Palm Beach.
The notion that the nation’s most exclusive resorts can’t find employees, and must import workers, simply doesn’t compute. In addition to the millions of newcomers, Florida has 13 state universities, 26 community colleges and 32 private colleges with tens of thousands of students willing to work to earn money to contribute to their tuition and living costs. But the probability is that those coveted jobs at upscale locations will go to H-2B workers because employers prefer cheap foreign-born, nonimmigrant visa holders to Americans. The White House is onboard with subverting U.S. workers too. Last year, the Biden administration made 55,000 additional visas available on top of the annual 66,000 allotment, the largest H-2B visa increase since 2017.
Every year, the media promotes the false idea that employers can’t find workers and that the only solution is more H-2B visa workers. But a quick look at the southern border proves that plenty of people are available to work, and their totals increase every day. Millions of migrants have crossed into the U.S., with the vast majority having received parole, a classification that includes work permission. Numerous studies published by liberal-leaning Washington think tanks have determined that, despite Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbyists’ insistence, the U.S. doesn’t have a labor shortage. After studying the top 15 H-2B occupations that include the leisure industry, the Economic Policy Institute concluded that persistently flat wages undermine the claim that labor shortages exist.
Nevertheless, Congress’ House Appropriations Committee proposed expansions in both the H-2B and the related H-2A guest worker programs for fiscal 2024. Behind closed doors, these increases also might be slipped into a House continuing resolution. Any guest worker visa increase, especially during this extended and ongoing open border period, is a harmful if not devastating blow to low-skilled black and Hispanic Americans who have low worker participation rates and are experiencing rising unemployment. As reported in The Hill on July 7, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that “black Americans make up nearly 90 percent of those who are unemployed in the U.S. since April.”
Even though blacks and Hispanics are the demographic that Democrats court and depend on for their re-election, Congress’ annual behind-the-scenes maneuvering for increases in H-2As and H-2Bs stacks the deck against their long-time voting base. The U.S. labor market needs a pause in employment-authorized immigration whether its paroled migrants or congressionally approved visa hikes. In the meantime, if employers sincerely believe that the labor market has a worker shortage, they could adopt the historic, tried-and-true solution – offer higher wages.
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Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.
Employers Voice Annual False Lament About Labor Shortage
