Employers requested fewer additional seasonal workers this summer than the Department of Homeland Security made available, despite complaints of labor shortages.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as of Sept. 15 stopped accepting petitions for H-2B nonagricultural guestworker visas for fiscal year 2017, the agency announced Sept. 19.
The original cap of 66,000 H-2B visas was reached in March, leaving many landscapers, amusement parks, resorts, and other seasonal businesses without access to the workers they needed in the spring and summer. Congress ultimately included a provision in an omnibus spending measure that allowed the DHS to roughly double the number of ...