Immigrant Workers

The Baltimore Sun and the Salisbury Daily Times both ran articles today on the crisis in the H2B (seasonal temporary worker) program, while the New York Times ran an article on problems caused by the limited number of H1B (professional or technical work) visas.

Many of the seasonal employees on the Eastern Shore have relied on the H2B visa program to fill their temporary jobs.  Crab picking houses, restaurants, landscaping and other seasonal employers have bought people in from other countries every year for a long time.  Unfortunately, due to the failure of Congress to extend a provision of the law that exempts returning workers from the 66,000 cap, many are unable to get the workers they need this year.

The impact of this is felt not only by the companies that are unable to get the workers they need, but also by the companies that supply them - the truckers, container manufacturers and haulers, etc.  A study by the University of Maryland of the crab industry indicated that each temporary crab picker here on a H2B visa created 2 and a half additional jobs. 

While there are those who say that these companies should just raise their wages and hire Americans, it's not clear how many Americans are willing to take these jobs which only run ten to twenty weeks.  With unemployment low in Maryland, where would the workers come from?  How much more would you be willing to pay for a restaurant meal or a pound of crabmeat to be sure that all the workers were American citizens? 

The problems cited by the New York Times are a bit different.  New York City is a world financial center, headquarters to many global firms and a major world banking center.  But many of the multi-national firms headquartered in NYC are reporting difficulty in getting the temporary visas they need for their exectives and top managers to work in their headquarters office.  Similarly, the big banks are reporting that they are unable to hire foreign graduates of American colleges and universities because of the shortage of H1B visas.

Alcoa, for example, has one of it's chief financial executives, Vannesa Lau, working in its Geneva offices because of the difficulty in getting a visa for her to work in New York.  There are plenty of similar stories.

This is important because New York doesn't compete with Cleveland or St. Louis or Phoenix, for the most part, it competes with London, Geneva, Frankfurt, Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other global financial centers that have more liberal visa requirements.

Where am I going with all this?  Well, it's all a piece of our national schizophrenia about immigrants and immigration.  Almost all of us are descended from immigrants (like those in the photo above) who came to America looking for a brighter future for them and their children.  We want America to be strong and competitive in the global economy and we want our businesses to be succesful and grow our domestic economy.  But the restrictions we place on foreigners who want to legally come here and work make that difficult or impossible in some cases.

Of course, we want everyone to obey our immigration laws.  But building a system of laws that sharply restricts legal immigration while simultaneously creating an economy that demands millions more workers than we have is a recipe for failure.  It's futile to waste billions and billions of dollars on immigration enforcement while we have a system that basically requires employers and employees to circumvent the law.  The real victims when we do that are ourselves.

I find it ironic to stroll down the boardwalk in Ocean City and see shirts for sale that say "Welcome to America, now speak English" in shops that are staffed largely by students from Ukraine, Romania, Russia and even Nepal (They're here on J1 visas)and whose English perhaps is not that good.  Have we forgotten that, when our ancestors arrived here they may have not spoken any English.  There are still pockets in some big cities where Italian, Polish, German, Chinese or Russian can be heard. 

So let's support comprehensive immigration reform.  And sure, it should include strong enforcement of our immigration laws.  But it should also include a reasonable opportunity for those who want to immigrate to our country, to help build its future and to become American - the 'tired, the poor, the huddled masses learning to breathe free' - as the Emma Lazerus poem engraved within the statue states and as we all remember. 

Comments

[Jim]

"the 'tired, the poor, the huddled masses learning to breathe free' - as the Emma Lazerus poem engraved within the statue states and as we all remember. "

as one of the earliest zionists, Emma lazerus's poem for Palestine (now Israel) was much shorter "Jews Only"

interesting that she didnt favor open borders for the place she truley considered to be her home

[Tom Wilson]

Thanks for the comment. I had no idea she was a zionist. She died in the 19th century, I think.

[Jim]

from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lazarus

"She is known as an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. In fact, she argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Herzl began to use the term Zionism.[4]"

4 Yearning for Zion by Briana Simon (WZO Hagshama

[ShoreThings]

Your posts are very enjoyable to read. Thanks for linking to ShoreIndie.