Thread: Visa path for some jobs to be eased

Visa path for some jobs to be eased
Seasonal workers to get break with new rules to be announced today
by Nicole Gaouette - May. 22, 2008 12:00 AM
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON - With restaurants and resorts facing summer staff shortages, the Bush administration will announce federal regulations today to streamline the way foreign workers enter the United States for seasonal jobs.

The Department of Labor is rewriting rules to help employers find and hire workers for temporary jobs as landscapers, waitresses and crab pickers more quickly and efficiently than current guidelines allow.

In one major change affecting industries such as construction and shipyards, the definition of "temporary" will be drastically expanded - from the current 10 months to three years.
Adjusting the H2B visa program is part of an ongoing administration effort to reconfigure immigration laws on a piecemeal basis in the absence of a comprehensive overhaul.

Last year, an attempt to remake the nation's immigration laws collapsed in Congress amid conservative anger over proposals to grant legal status to many illegal immigrants currently in the country.

A frustrated President Bush, who had favored the overhaul, responded with a 28-point plan to tighten enforcement at the border and in the workplace - moves largely meant to placate conservative Republicans. That has led to more aggressive immigration raids and an even greater shortage of workers.

But in an effort to aid businesses, Bush also outlined plans to simplify existing visa programs for foreign farm workers, highly skilled professionals and the short-term workers from all over the world who enter the country with H2B visas.

There are limits, however, to the administration's ability to change the seasonal visa program, especially in one crucial area: the number of visas available.

Employers consider the 66,000 new visas offered every year to be completely inadequate, but efforts to expand the H2B program have been stymied in Congress. So federal officials hope that by smoothing out the procedures, some of the difficulties businesses are having filling jobs with foreign workers will be eased.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that the changes would cut down bureaucratic delays.

And allowing shipyards and construction businesses to bring workers in for three years, Chao said, will help those industries remain competitive in a global market.

"Sometimes temporary work is not confined to one year," she said.






http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... s0522.html

Whatever happened to visas for YOUTH temp workers? I've seen these college students from overseas at theme parks, piers, etc for years. They come for the summer and then go home.

Temp workers do NOT need to bring their families here, there is NO reason for this and fraught with potential abuse. Most will "manage" to birth a child here and whine that they must stay.

H-2A visas should be enough!

We already know that half the "illegal" immigrants here now have overstayed a visa. Is this another back door, legal immigration status trick?

Any provision to insure the "temporary" workers leave after three years?

Published Wednesday May 21, 2008
Government wants changes to foreign worker rules
By JESSE J. HOLLAND AP Labor Writer
The Associated Press
http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1000&u_sid=10340597

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration wants to streamline the process of bringing foreign workers into the country for temporary nonagricultural employment, saying the current system takes too long and is too cumbersome for businesses desperately looking for employees.

The Labor Department on Wednesday announced that it would propose changes to the H-2B visa program, which allows 66,000 temporary nonagricultural workers to enter the country every year.

The proposals "will give the department additional tools to help protect employees as well as get employers out from under duplicative bureaucracies," Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said.

Among the suggested changes include getting rid of duplicative applications at the state and federal levels, requiring employers to attest - under the threat of fines and disbarment - that they are following all program rules and federalizing the determination of wages.

The proposals also would prohibit employers from passing along the cost of the new proposals to their employees and allow the Labor Department for the first time to enforce terms and conditions of temporary foreigner employment and fine violators.

The Homeland Security Department currently is responsible for enforcing these regulations but Labor has more expertise in the area, Chao said.

Employers are having a hard time filling seasonal nonagricultural jobs, and Chao said making the H-2B system work more efficiently would be one step toward fixing the problem.

With Congress stymied on changing the immigration system, President Bush asked his Cabinet secretaries to come up with ways to modernize the immigration system administratively, Chao said.

The proposed changes will be made public in the Federal Register on Thursday. Chao said they hoped to have final regulations before the end of the year.

The Senate on Wednesday night knocked out two immigration-related proposals from an Iraq war funding bill, including allowing 1.4 million immigrant farm workers to stay in the United States for up to five years and extending an expired program to allow seasonal, nonagricultural workers to return to the country using H-2B visas.