WSJ Weighs In on Labor’s Attempt to Scuttle H-2B

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The Wall Street Journal on its online Opinion page Tuesday, April 21, took a swipe at the shenanigans of Labor Secretary Tom Perez in attempting to make the H-2B program so cumbersome that it will be unusable.

The editorial points to Perez doing the “dirty work” of the AFL-CIO that wants to see the seasonal nonimmigrant guest worker programs shut down. The two programs are the H-2B for seasonal, non-U.S., non-agriculture guest workers and H-2A for seasonal agricultural workers. Landscape companies are the biggest users of H-2B workers, annually snapping up about half of the program’s government-mandated 66,000 visas. Most of the seasonal workers taking advantage of the program come from Mexico and Central America.

According to the editorial, entitled “Labor’s Dirty Tricks”, lawyers for the Labor Department appeared in federal court in north Florida April 21 to answer to Judge M. Casey Rodgers, who sounds increasingly skeptical about the department’s honesty. The issue revolves around the Department of Labor (DOH) ongoing efforts “to regulate to death a legal guest-worker program,” quoting the article.

The editorial accuses Labor of screwing up H-2A visas for agriculture so badly they are hardly worth pursuing. And now Labor it is targeting H-2B visas “with all manner of new requirement ranging from dictating how pay is determined and what housing employers must provide to increasing the amount of paperwork,” wrote the WSJ.

Access the full article on the WSJ website here.