Kentucky Derby Teams Jockey for Worker Visas at Track and Beyond

As horse racing enthusiasts gear up for the May 4 Kentucky Derby, employers in the racing industry worry that evolving immigration policy could hurt their ability to enter horses in future events.

The industry employs workers using two kinds of visas: H-2A visas for agricultural jobs for workers on breeding farms and H-2B visas for “backstretch” workers at the racetrack. Both visa categories are meant for low-skilled, seasonal workers, but the H-2B visa comes with a cap of 66,000, doled out in two halves of the year.

That cap and a rising demand for these visas among employers in spring and summer has led to hiring complications. Last year, high demand led to the first-ever lottery for H-2B visas, and subsequently the Department of Homeland Security released additional visas for returning workers. History is repeating itself in 2019, and the horse racing industry says it’s paying the price.

As the program stands, employers that couldn’t get all the guestworkers they wanted are waiting for the 30,000 additional visas for returning workers that the Department of Homeland Security announced March 29. “That will handle about 80 percent of the remaining demand for workers in the industry,” Elizabeth Conley Buckley, founding partner of immigration law firm Conley Law Group PLLC in Lexington, Ky., told Bloomberg Law.

Trainers who need workers are worried about when those visas will become available. Once the notice of rulemaking for the additional H-2B visas is published, there’s still a two-week comment period before employers can file for certification, said Buckley, who owns racehorses herself. Even when using premium processing for those applications—15 days—the soonest trainers are likely to get approval to hire workers is June 1, and the season ends around Nov. 30, she said. That means racing teams waiting on visas will only have the workers they need for half the time allowed by the program for what they argue is a year-round job.

“It’s worked for us in the past, but it’s not working for us now,” said Alex Waldrop, CEO of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association. “It’s only getting worse as the unemployment rate goes down. We need comprehensive immigration reform for the changing workforce in this country. We need more workers.”

Skills Needed

Trainer Dale Romans, head of Dale Romans Racing, said he got lucky this year and will have the 50 workers he needs for the height of racing season. “It’s not the most efficient system by any means, but it’s the only one we have to work off of,” he said.

Romans has run 10 horses in the Kentucky Derby over nine years. He said that he needs his H-2B workers—mostly from Mexico and Guatemala—because U.S. workers are scarce for his particular needs. “Nobody wants to do these jobs anymore. They’re labor-intensive, there’s an amount of skill and danger involved, and people just don’t want to do this kind of work,” he said.

Backstretch work on the race track includes “hot-walking” horses that come off the race track to cool them down; cleaning stalls and horses and providing feed and water; and overseeing the care of the horses and barn work, Romans said.

“There are about four levels of backstretch work, and it’s all skilled labor,” he said. “Not everyone can walk a million-dollar horse.”

Overall, the horse racing industry constitutes a small percentage of employers seeking labor certifications to hire seasonal guestworkers for the spring and summer. In FY 2018, petitions for non-farm-animal caretakers were only 1.3 percent of total certified applications for H-2B workers, according to data from the Department of Labor. In 2018, about 900 applications for labor certifications were submitted for guestworker jobs in the horse racing industry and 749 were approved, said Daniel Costa, director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute.

The industry is concentrated in Kentucky, New York, California, and Florida.

Landscaping accounts for the vast majority of total spring and summer guestworker certifications, at 45.5 percent in 2018, with forestry and conservation workers, maids and housekeeping cleaners, amusement and recreation attendants, and meat, poultry, and fish processing workers rounding out the top five.

Politics and Policy

The industry’s share of visas may be small, but its influence could drive policy decisions in Washington.

Horse PAC, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association’s bipartisan federal political action committee, has raised more than $4 million since 2002 for candidates that support the industry. One of the items it lobbies for is changes to the H-2B visa program that would better enable horse teams to get the workers they need.

Influencers in the horse racing industry would like to see changes to the H-2B visa program, including making racetrack workers eligible for the H-2A program, “because the work does concern live animals,” Buckley said.

The racing industry also is working to create a returning worker exemption in the H-2B program in the next appropriations bill, which could alleviate constraints the visa cap puts on available workers, she added.

If unemployment stays as low as it is, demand for guestworker visas likely will continue, Costa said. “Congress continues to make modifications for the cap, but does it through appropriations bills instead of going through a more traditional legislative route.”

The H-2B visa program as a whole doesn’t function well, Costa said, citing the program’s reputation for low wages and easy-to-meet requirements to show employers have tried to find U.S. workers.

“There are some much-needed reforms before it is expanded,” he said.