Dear Secretaries Mayorkas and Su:
The H-2B Workforce Coalition is comprised of small and seasonal businesses across the country owned and operated by thousands of employers and their representatives from industries such as lodging, landscaping, seafood, restaurants, tourism, equine, forestry, mobile outdoor amusement, golf courses, and others. Our members are seasonal businesses that rely on the H-2B visa program to supplement their U.S. workforce during seasonal surge and peak business needs.
On behalf of our members, we urge you to promptly make all the available supplemental H-2B visas for Fiscal Year 2025 accessible to employers, as you did for Fiscal Year 2024. These visas will provide employers with the ability to better handle their labor
challenges, as they will have additional certainty regarding their workforce planning decisions in the coming months. We urge you to promptly publish a temporary rule implementing the release of these supplemental visas.
We also support the Administration’s efforts to increase access to H-2B visas for foreign nationals from the Northern Triangle countries, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. We are working with these foreign governments to help diminish the irregular migration from these countries by streamlining the application process for foreign workers from these countries.
We are grateful that the Administration’s past actions recognized the dire shortage of seasonal labor in the U.S. Many employers turn to the H-2B program to meet their workforce needs to not only sustain their businesses, but also to support their American
workers. Every H-2B worker supports 4.64 U.S. jobs.1 Furthermore, a 2020 Government Accountability Office report concluded that “counties with H-2B employers generally had lower unemployment rates and higher average weekly wages than counties that do
not have any H-2B employers.”2 The H-2B program places many requirements on employers to recruit U.S. workers, and our members work to employ as many U.S. workers as they can. In these unprecedented times, there are simply not enough workers
to meet the seasonal workforce needs of U.S. employers. The most current employment data illustrates the workforce struggles of seasonal businesses nationwide. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that during July 2024 the unemployment rate was 4.3% and
average annual hourly wages increased by $.08.3
Thank you for acknowledging the seasonal labor crisis and unprecedented demand that led to the Administration’s planned release of all the supplemental H-2B visas that were available to U.S. employers during FY24. We encourage you to promptly promulgate a temporary final rule for FY 2025 along the same lines as the FY24 rule.