Every cloud has a silver lining. The best part about any needlessly reactionary legislative battle is waiting for the unintended consequences to pop up. Like remember when a bunch of states made vague anti-gay-marriage Constitutional amendments and now it’s harder in those states to get a DV conviction if you’re not married to the guy who’s punching you? That will always be the classic example, but now we have another example that is almost as good.
Remember that Senate immigration bill clusterfuck? The one that when we heard ‘immigrant’ we were supposed to think ‘Mexican’? The one that pleased exactly no one?
Well, it turns out that there are other countries besides Mexico, and some of the people who live in those countries would like to work in America for a short amount of time. Who knew? And we’re not talking filthy brown leprosy-spreading farmhands, here – we’re talking about the sexy young Eastern Europeans who guard your pools and ski slopes. Yes, that’s right, in our rush to prevent the bad kind of immigrant- you know, your poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free- from undercutting Americans who might want to do excruciating farm work under an unrelenting sun for sub-minimum wages, we accidentally hurt those we need the most: the young foreign adventure-seekers who keep our seasonal attractions running smoothly.
Among the casualties when the bill collapsed was the expansion of a visa program called H-2B, which allows employers to recruit 66,000 foreigners a year to fill jobs for up to six months. The bill would have lifted the cap to 100,000 and would also have made permanent an exemption that now allows in thousands more temporary workers but is set to expire on Sept. 30.
H-2B has become so popular among resort operators, race tracks, casinos, landscapers and others that this summer’s supply of visas ran out in March. Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, where the seafood industry depends on Mexican H-2B workers to pick the meat from Chesapeake Bay crabs for canning, has vowed to attach an expansion of the program to other legislation.
Ignore the bit about the crab canning, because we will not be seeing too much of those Mexicans again for the rest of the article.
Stephen Lavery, president of Virginia-based High Sierra Pools Inc., says that he hired neighborhood kids as lifeguards when he began his pool-management company 18 years ago, but that the labor source soon began to dry up. College students began taking internships that would buff their post-graduation résumés, or sought jobs they could continue during the school year. High-school students signed up for summer courses or exotic travel to build up their college applications.
…Mr. Lavery, whose company provides lifeguards and maintenance to 250 Washington-area pools, says his first H-2B hires a dozen years ago were Germans. But the dollar has weakened against the euro and Western European students have flocked to European Union countries where they don’t need visas and can earn more money.
That has forced pool operators to recruit further east each year. This year for the first time, Mr. Lavery has workers from Kazakhstan and Russia, in addition to such mainstay H-2B suppliers as Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. “I’ve heard there’s options in Thailand,” he says.
This actually does suck a lot because the H-2B seems like a great way to see America. It kind of makes me wish I’d typed “work in Europe” into Google at least once back when I had summers free:
On a recent bright Saturday, Patricia Fajtova, a 21-year-old Slovak marketing student, explained how she came to be sitting guard at an apartment-house pool in Washington using a temporary cultural-exchange visa: “I typed ‘work in the USA’ into the Google,” and up popped the Sierra Pools Web site, she said.
…All three women said they opted for jobs in the U.S. after concluding that careers and marriage will soon limit their opportunities to visit. “We have more chance to see Europe later,” said Ms. Ivosevic.
So this was kind of a win-win situation for everyone. Sure, it was kind of a pain in the ass for employeers, but they were clearly getting quality workers and young people were getting an opportunity to fund some travel and anyone who’s worked seasonal jobs at recreational facilities knows that that’s normally a blast. I’d worked in an amusement park for three summers, and I’d jump all over the chance to do that in Spain or Germany or even Japan.
Then we had to go all “gahh! Mexicans!” And while we absolutely failed to do anything useful about the Mexican ‘problem’ (whether you defined the problem as the mere presence of Mexicans in America or the way they’re exploited once they get here) we did manage to bone our ski resort managers and those nice Slovakian kids who guard the community pool. Good on us.* I guess we’ll put that in the ‘ironic victories’ pile, with all the others.
*Since this will largely inconvenience those with the means to go skiing or to resorts, I actually mean that. Somethings got to wake these people up because if we were thinking then this sort of thing wouldn’t be happening, right?
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