President Donald Trump’s harsh criticism of immigration programs and Congress’ refusal to lift a cap on work visas meant many seasonal businesses had to hire American this summer — and pay their workers more.

That's good news for Trump, for U.S. workers, and for supporters of Trump's “American First” agenda, but business groups complain that increased spending on wages will ultimately cost jobs and sap company profits. Across the country, enterprises ranging from oyster shuckers to landscapers say they were forced to give up contracts and forgo revenue because they just couldn’t find enough workers to do the jobs this summer.


"There were a lot of businesses that lost a lot of revenue,” said Laurie Flanagan, co-chair of the H-2B Workforce Coalition, a lobbying group with a membership that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Trump has blasted programs that allow foreign guest workers to take jobs in the U.S. legally. “Widespread abuse in our immigration system is allowing American workers of all backgrounds to be replaced by workers brought in from other countries to fill the same job for sometimes less pay,” he told workers in Wisconsin in April. “This will stop.”

The Trump administration hasn't moved specifically against the visas for summer workers — known as H-2Bs. His own companies use H-2B workers, especially at his Mar-a-Lago resort, which recently requested H-2B visas for 70 cooks, housekeepers and servers to start in October. But an executive order that Trump signed in April put the federal government on notice that he intended to tighten restrictions on guest-worker visas, and created a chilling effect.

The U.S. had 66,000 slots this year for foreign workers to staff non-agricultural seasonal businesses — landscapers, hotels and seafood processors among them. By March, these slots were all filled. In previous years, Congress often dealt with such shortages by extending the guest workers' H-2B visas. But this year Congress ignored employers’ pleas, putting the decision in the hands of the administration. In response, the Department of Homeland Security added 15,000 visas in what then-DHS Secretary John Kelly called a "one-time increase." Even that somewhat grudging gesture didn't occur until mid-July, when nearly one-third of summer was already past.

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The Beachmere Inn in Ogunquit, a seaside village in southeastern Maine, didn’t receive the eight H-2B visas it requested to supplement its summer housekeeping staff. To make ends meet, owner Sarah Diment recruited college kids through her Facebook network and cobbled together part-time shifts, some filled by American students and some by foreign students here on cultural exchange visas. In the past year, Diment estimates she had to boost housekeeping wages roughly 10 percent to keep employees.

Diment could continue to increase wages, but the higher staffing costs, she says, would make it difficult to keep the business open year-round. “Raising wages is good in theory, until you put it into practice,” she said.

North American Midway Entertainment, a large traveling-amusement-park company headquartered in Indiana, requested roughly 400 H-2B workers this year, a quarter of its total seasonal workforce. But the Department of Homeland Security reached its 66,000-visa cap before the company could secure the guest workers. Company President Danny Huston said he had to skip three fairs and contract out some ride operations because of the visa shortage. In total, he estimates that North American Midway may have lost as much as $800,000.

But the company was able to cover about one-third of the vacancies by hiring American through job fairs, newspaper advertisements, and social media. "We even set up a job fair in Puerto Rico," Huston said.

Other employers say hiring American just isn't an option.

Michael Martin owns a Maryland-based landscaping company. Roughly 40 percent of his workers — and the majority of those performing manual labor — hold H-2B visas, he told POLITICO. Martin received his H-2B workers on time this year, but he knows other landscapers who didn't, and lost clients as a result. "It affects people, their bottom line," he said, "whether they’re still in business, whether they’re going to make it next year."

The H-2B program requires employers to first seek out U.S. workers before they bring in guest workers. But Americans, Martin says, just won’t take landscaping jobs. He paid $2,500 for a two-week want ad that ran in the Baltimore Sun (print and online) and on social media. The jobs Martin was advertising paid more than $14 an hour, slightly above the average wage for the job in his area. Even so, he got no applicants. “No parents in Maryland are raising their kids to swing a pickax,” Martin said.

Not everyone agrees with that view. Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the recruitment standards for the H-2B program aren't sufficient to give U.S. workers a real crack at the job.

“The requirements aren’t that onerous, and the DOL isn’t really checking all that much,” Costa said. H-2B employers are required to offer a so-called prevailing wage — defined as the average wage paid to people in a similar role in the same area — but Costa said the benchmark should be higher. A rider inserted in a 2016 spending bill, and re-upped again this year, allowed employers to use their own private wage surveys rather than Labor Department data to calculate prevailing wages. “There’s always some sort of loophole,” Costa said.

If H-2B workers had skills that were hard to find in the U.S., one might expect H-2B wages to be rising faster than those of other workers. But in a recent report, Costa found the opposite: Wage growth over the past decade in nine of the top 10 H-2B occupations was slower than wage growth for all workers, and some occupations actually lost ground. (Waiters and waitresses were the exception, with 20 percent wage growth from 2004 to 2016.)

Some employers say they can't raise wages substantially without pricing their products out of the market. Raz Halili is an owner of Prestige Oysters, a seafood processing outfit with operations in Louisiana and South Texas. He says he lost $3.5 million in sales this year because he got only one-third of the 150 H-2B workers he needed to shuck oysters. Prestige Oysters posted the H-2B worker positions at $9.64 an hour, according to data provided to the Labor Department. That's $2.39 above the state minimum wage, but $2.63 below the national 2016 average hourly wage for “meat, poultry, and fish cutters and trimmers,” according to EPI.

“You raise wages, and then you raise the prices of your crab meat,” says Jack Brooks, president of Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. Customers will pay more for domestic crab meat, he says, but if the price goes high enough, they’ll buy from "the guy down the street who’s using Chinese crab meat.”

EPI’s Costa disagrees with that logic. “It’s true that you can only raise [wages] so high,” he said. “I’m not saying that you should be paying $30 to $40 to people picking crabs.” But more modest increases — from $9 to $12 an hour, for instance — could bear different results, he said. “If you don’t have a business model that requires you to pay a decent wage," Costa said, "then you have to think about your business model."

One reason guest-worker wages tend to be low, quite apart from questions about the scarcity of their skills, is that the workers are by definition vulnerable as temporary guests of the U.S. government. “This is a controllable and compliant workforce,” said Art Read, general counsel with Philadelphia-based Friends of Farmworkers. “A U.S. worker with a family may miss a day of work.”

But many employers say the jobs that H-2B workers perform are so miserable that few Americans would take them, even at substantially higher pay. Of oyster shucking, Prestige Oyster's Halili says, "It’s a dirty, gritty job that most people just don’t want to do. They’ll do it for a few days or they’ll do it for a week, and then they just won’t show up.”

Meanwhile, despite the high demand, the 15,000 H-2B visas that DHS added to the pile in August are not yet exhausted — a bit of a surprise given the intense lobbying efforts by business groups and members of Congress. The H-2B Workforce Coalition's Flanagan chalks it up to how late in the fiscal year the visas were made available.

“I think that it’s the timing,” she said. “It would have been a different story if we saw visas released earlier in the process.”