Idaho labor chief urges extension after Congress clips special visas

By Betsy Z. Russell - The Spokesman-Review

Stone cutters from Mexico, food service workers from France and Indonesia, even a couple of Sun Valley ski instructors from Austria all are able to work in Idaho, thanks to a special guest-worker visa program that Congress has now cut off.

"This action will severely affect the ability of Idaho employers who recruit foreign workers to maintain their work forces in the face of extremely low unemployment," Idaho Department of Labor Director Roger Madsen warned this week.

Madsen sent a letter to Idaho's four-member congressional delegation urging support for extending the H2-B visa program, several aspects of which expired Sept. 30. The program allows nonagricultural workers from foreign countries to come to the United States for specific seasonal jobs, provided the employer can't find Americans to take the jobs and the workers return home after no more than 10 months. After staying in their home country for two months, they can come back to work for another 10 months.

The program is capped at 66,000 workers per year, but a 2005 law exempted from that limit those who are returning for additional stints at the same job. The exemption, however, has now expired, and the cap was reached Oct. 1. The Senate passed legislation Oct. 16 to extend the exemption for another year as an amendment to an appropriation bill, but the clause wasn't in the House version of the bill, leaving its fate up to a conference committee.

In Idaho, 90 employers took part in the H2-B visa program last year, bringing in 2,200 foreign workers. Ski resorts, tree planting businesses and stone quarries were the main industries involved.

"It's absolutely 100 percent required for us to keep our doors open," said Ryan Rudgers, human resources manager for L&W Stone, which operates the Three Rivers Stone quarry near Challis. "We rely on these guys every year."

Three Rivers brings in a crew of 50 to 70 stone cutters from Mexico each summer. "They actually split stone by hand, using a hammer and chisel," Rudgers said. "It's a good, close-knit crew."

Rudgers said his company could never find enough workers for those labor-intensive jobs in the rural area where it operates one of the nation's largest-producing flagstone quarries. Idaho's extremely low unemployment rates — 2.3 percent in September — make it even harder, he said.

Around the nation, the H2-B program is used by the seafood canning industry in Maryland, hotels in Texas and ski resorts in Vermont. Some in the ski industry have been particularly hard hit by the timing, as they're just gearing up for their winter season.

At Sun Valley Ski Resort, human resources director Matt Park said the resort's more than 200 H2-B workers for the ski season had been approved before the program hit its cap Oct. 1.

"We were fortunate to get in early," he said.

Like many ski resorts, Sun Valley uses both H2-B foreign workers and foreign college students who come to America on J1 student visas. Schweitzer Mountain Resort and Tamarack Resort bring in foreign students but have no H2-B visa employees.