Be Our Guest: Guestworkers in Tourism and Hospitality in the United States 9783110643800, 9783110639728

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William Terry Be Our Guest

De Gruyter Studies in Tourism

Series editor Jillian M. Rickly

Volume 10

William Terry

Be Our Guest

Guestworkers in Tourism and Hospitality in the United States

ISBN 978-3-11-063972-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-064380-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063992-6 ISSN 2570-1657 e-ISSN 2570-1665 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938205 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Foreword For several years, I have lived within the shadow of one of Sweden’s major ski resorts, a community boasting just over 3,000 permanent inhabitants. This destination attracts both domestic and international visitors, most of whom arrive during the winter months. To be sure, the situation we encounter in this popular Swedish mountain resort plays out in numerous small communities worldwide, whose geographical assets have transformed them into popular destinations. Such places, including seaside and lakeside resorts, mountain settlements and gateway communities to national parks regularly suffer from a host of seasonality-related problems. Given their small populations and narrow employment base, these resort communities rely heavily on temporary workforces made up of individuals from other places. Often, these workers are international migrants. In the case of the Swedish resort, some workers are those with few options for employment such as recent migrants to the country who are granted temporary work placements. These individuals usually work behind the scenes, performing low skill tasks such as room cleaning or dishwashing. The type of work they perform means that they rarely, if ever, come into direct contact with the visitors. Meanwhile, the same destination also attracts its fair share of lifestyle migrants, namely Swedes and others who are drawn to the destination, primarily because they wish to participate in their favorite activity such as winter sports. To them, working in the destination is a means to an end; it enables them to participate in a pursuit they enjoy, such as mountain biking or cross-country skiing. Among these lifestyle workers, we encounter Canadian and Italian ski instructors who work there for part of the year. When the winter season is over, some of them take up temporary assignments at winter sport destinations in the southern hemisphere (e.g., New Zealand). Topics such as the mobility of tourism work and workers have long grabbed my own attention as a researcher who, in recent years, has been focusing increasingly on issues revolving around the social equity dimension of sustainable development. One thing I have noticed in my own investigations is that, despite the emergence of the subdiscipline of labor geographies in Human Geography, to this day, few scholars have chosen to examine the spatial dimensions of tourism work and workers. Indeed, the by-now-sizeable volume of literature on tourism work and workers focuses mostly on themes such as the quality of jobs, narratives concerning the poor skills and wages related to this employment sector, labor turnover, calculations of employment multiplier effects to name but a few. I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised to see this impressive contribution by William Terry, a scholar who in recent years has emerged as one of the leading voices in the field of the labor geographies of tourism workers. In this well-woven volume, Terry once more highlights his skills as a researcher and writer, traits he displayed in his earlier pathbreaking examinations of the geographies of Filipino cruise ship workers. Specifically, he offers us a theoretically and empirically rich study of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-202

VI

Foreword

temporary foreign guestworkers who are employed in numerous seasonal resorts around the United States. His aim is to describe how such places that often offer few options for economic growth other than tourism must depend more and more on these guestworkers. What are the implications of this dependence? To answer these questions, Terry has invested much time and energy collecting data from various parts of the United States. Other than digging deep to identify how the various temporary work visa programs function he interviewed an array of actors, ranging from human resource directors and managers of hotels and resorts, employment recruitment agents and other intermediaries, advocacy and volunteer groups, participants in the summer work program but also many workers. The result is a fascinating comprehensive account of, on the one hand, why short-term work programs have occurred and are still going strong in the first place and how and why their significance for the American tourism industry grew over time, especially in communities where gentrification forces have led to a significant local labor force reduction. On the other hand, we gain a clear depiction into the lives of guestworkers, the challenges they face and the unanticipated disappointments they encounter. It is truly rare to find an academic book on any topic that is also an excellent and compelling read. In this volume, Terry has delivered an academic masterclass by producing an excellent piece of scholarship, which surely should be a must on any labor geographer’s bookshelf. Certainly, this is a must read for anyone interested in matters relating to tourism work and workers. Dimitri Ioannides, PhD Östersund, Sweden 9th May 2022

Acknowledgements The research that eventually came together to form the basis of this book spanned many years, and I received a great deal of support from individuals and institutions to who I owe a debt of gratitude. At Clemson University, The Clemson Humanities Hub, The College of Art, Architecture and Humanities Faculty Research Development Program, the University Research Grant Program and the Department of History and Geography all provided various means of financial support that allowed me to travel around the country to see the places where guest workers have become part of the fabric of tourism seasons. To my colleague and the sole fellow geographer in my department at Clemson, Criss Smith, I can only say that I have no idea what would have happened with my career had I not met you by chance in Lincoln, Nebraska. Thanks for always having my back, I’ll always do my best to return the favor. To my colleagues in PRTM at Clemson, Lauren Duffy and Greg Ramshaw thank you for including me as a nonofficial, honorary member of your department. It has been a pleasure to have a group of like-minded academics on campus. Also, Bill Norman in PRTM particularly was invaluable in helping me make connections with resort managers and other individuals who could provide me with guidance and interviews. One of these was Carl Pelletier in Jackson, Wyoming, who was kind enough to drive me around to give me the lay of the land and introduce me to several people around town. That introduction made me feel incredibly welcomed, and I fully understand why so many people want to live there. I left feeling a sense of envy for those who have that opportunity. To others in the academic community who have shown interest in my research on workers in tourism industries, your support and encouragement has helped keep me going by letting me know that this is a topic worth pursuing. In this regard, Dimitri Ioannides and Kristina Zampoukos have been particularly supportive in their writing and by inviting me to spend a week at Mid Sweden University to talk about my work with students. Shannon Guillot has also been an unexpected pleasure to work with, whose raw enthusiasm and unique perspective on research about migrant workers has been an inspiration. I’m so happy she wrote me out of the blue to ask if I would be on her dissertation committee. I hope she and I, “Dr. Clemson,” have the opportunity to work more together in the future. Marcia England provided me valuable advice on navigating book proposals, manuscript writing and is just a great person to hang out with. Of course, finally among academics is Jillian Rickly who has taken on the gargantuan effort of being this book series editor on top of all her other research, teaching, and service work. I marvel at her abilities and the fact that I came to randomly meet her by chance when we were both reading AP Human Geography exams early in our careers. Also deserving of recognition is Maximilian Gessl at De Gruyter Press, who has been nothing but a patient and a steady guiding hand throughout this process. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-203

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Acknowledgements

Chris Vanderwiele deserves a special acknowledgement. This project would not have happened without him as the person who helped me to make the connection between my previous work on the cruise industry and the guestworkers that were living near him. In the early stages of this project, he was instrumental in connecting me to local stakeholders in his community and showing me around his town. It was not only a pleasure to have him as a student, but even more so to get to know him and his family in the years afterward. To all of my wonderful friends who keep me sane and laughing . . . . Andy, Corey, and Rob, you’ve been amazing friends these past 25 years; I live for our getaway trips. To Chris Lombardi, one of the great pleasures of my life was reconnecting after way too much time in which our lives took separate paths. I wish we had never had that gap, but I’m so happy we picked up right where we left off and have been able to share our lives ever since. And what can I say about Tim? My brother from another mother, my beer and bourbon buddy, and my trivia partner, to just name a few things. It has to be rare to find such a great friend after the age of 35. I’m not sure that there has been a single day in the past five years that he and I haven’t been texting about some random topic or another. Finally, I have to thank my family with whose love and support has made everything I do possible. My parents and other relatives have always been quick to ask how things are going with my research, and while I hated being asked how the book was going (so much pressure!), I always appreciated the question. To Sylvia, I couldn’t ask for a better daughter, travel buddy, research assistant (thanks for helping take notes in Gatlinburg!), rock climbing partner, and gaming rival. I only hope I can be half as good of a dad to her as she has been a kid to me. And finally to my wife, Annie. What can I say, she makes everything possible. I could barely get out of bed in the morning without her and probably wouldn’t want to. More than anyone she has had to put up with me and allowed me the space and time to pull this work into the station.

Contents Foreword

V

Acknowledgements

VII

1

An Introduction

2

Tourism Work, Seasonality, and Labor Migration in the United States 25

3

Why, we only Live to Serve!: A Brief History of Guestworker Programs 42

4

Pushing the Boulder up the Hill

5

Islands in the Stream

6

Put our Service to the Test: Employing Guestworkers

7

Precarious Work – It Takes a Village

8

Politics and Immigration Reform

9

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

231

191

209

List of Abbreviations List of Figures

1

229

227

65

88

137 161

114

1 An Introduction A Day in the Life As dawn breaks and the sun slowly crests on the horizon, and the sparkle of the first rays of light begin to twinkle on the undulating waves, the beach starts to come alive. Even while you still sleep in your darkened hotel room, your day at the shore is being prepared for you. A young man and woman begin to make their way out onto the sand, one carrying a drill, the other now unlocking a chest set back toward the dunes. One by one the young man, an engineering student from Turkey, augers a hole in the sand. His companion, newly arrived from Romania just last week, inserts large fabric beach umbrellas into neat rows. He has been here since just before Memorial Day and knows that today is going to be another scorcher that is likely to see every shaded beach chair rented out by 10 AM. She is on summer break from earning a business degree at her university in Bucharest and has come to the United States to work on her English skills for the next three months while she pays off the trip with this beach service job and perhaps save a little extra. The latter may depend on if she takes a second job at the local grocery store, which her new flat mates have told her is actively hiring foreign students like herself. As they finish setting up for the day, the first beachgoers arrive, just as you begin to wake up. The morning finds you hungry and ready to prepare for the day at the beach with a large breakfast. Making your way to the continental breakfast, you and your family encounter a couple of middle-aged African American women, who woke up three hours ago in order to make it here to set up the self-service station for the guests. They are friendly and welcoming, but they appear tired. After all, they had to board their shuttle an hour before the sun rose in order to make it in time for work. They start their day in the dark because jobs like this are not readily available in their own town where they can afford their rents. There are closer houses. They see them from the window of the shuttle that the resort organizes for their commute to and from work each day. Many of the houses even appear empty, sometimes for weeks on end. But those houses are not for them. They may work their whole lives and never be able to afford even the down payment on a home like these. There may not be a single house at all on the entire barrier island where the resort lies that is even close to affordable. So, they board the bus every day instead, an hour to work and an hour back. But those sort of details of life are not the kind that someone staying at the hotel would likely know or even care to know. Now it is time to head out to the beach where you will spend the day under a nice blue umbrella that the nice young woman with the accent will rent to you, just as she did yesterday. You notice that it has gotten quite busy throughout the morning as more and more families find any available space to unfold their chairs, unfurl their towels, and set out their sunshades. Children up and down the beach are now https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-001

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1 An Introduction

digging for whatever treasures they can find below the sand or have set to conquering the sea with a castle that will surely hold back the breakers at high tide. Others have made their way into the crashing waves and squeal in delight as the ocean tosses them back and forth. You even feel a little nervous for allowing your own young children to swim today because they are not the most experienced swimmers and the waves are a little bit larger than normal. But your fears are somewhat assuaged by the protective looming presence of lifeguards atop their perches. The one nearest you just whistled at some other kid, yelling at him to come closer to shore, waving in with a motion from his hands. Interesting, he also had an accent. From where you aren’t sure. You have not met any Bulgarians in your life so it is not clear to you where he might be from. While you work your way through the novel you have been unable to put down since you arrived, your room is quickly being restored back to a state of order. The daily magic trick is being performed by a Jamaican woman who you will never see, but who is now straightening your sheets and replacing your towels so that your room will appear transformed upon your return. She’ll do the same for many more rooms into the afternoon, much as she has done for several months and will continue to do until after the summer is over. She is almost halfway through her nine month stay in the United States and misses her daughter desperately. But she is happy in the knowledge that her child living with her mother in Negril is getting a good education, paid for with the money she sends home regularly. She is making much more now cleaning these rooms in the United States than she does when she is working at the resorts in Negril, but it still takes a toll on her to be missing out on watching her daughter grow up. Video chatting helps but doesn’t really replace actually being there. But since she is here, she wishes that she could make more money than she does as a housekeeper, though she is not allowed to work anywhere else, and this hotel’s managers will not allow her to work more than 40 hours. Also, she is not allowed to switch to a better paying position or even find a new place to work according to the work visa rules. Her only other choice is to go home to Jamaica, and there are people at home depending on her. These things are in her mind, along with her aching back, as she finishes her allotment of rooms before the other occupants return from their own days out at the beach or shopping along the boardwalk. The boardwalk is where you’ll be headed tonight to try out that nice restaurant where you can eat crab legs on the outdoor patio as the sun goes down. When you arrive, you are greeted by a teenage American girl who is working her first job during her summer break from high school. She shows you to your table. You were lucky to get one with such a great view. Your food server is pleasant enough, and during conversation as he takes your order you find out he is doing this job during his own summer break from his university which is located in another part of the state. The restaurant is buzzing with activity. Empty tables are being wiped off and water glasses are being filled by a number of other young people, who once again

A Day in the Life

3

have accents from seemingly all over. You are pretty sure one is Irish, but you can’t quite place the other and think it must be from somewhere in Southeast Asia. You never see the man who prepared your salad or the assistant cook who helped to prepare the crab legs. They came from a town just up the coast from your room attendant’s home in Jamaica. In fact, they currently live in the same small complex of spartan apartments here on the island, which remains hidden to most tourists, but where many businesses have leased out flats for their seasonal employees. Business owners know that their workers will not have a prayer of finding an apartment on their own anywhere near their places of business otherwise. Because most of these workers do not have transportation of their own, and there is no reliable bus system in place, they had better set aside places for their foreign workers to stay that are relatively close. After dinner, it is time to go shopping at the boardwalk and enjoy some games and small rides with your family at the small amusement park/arcade that sits near the middle of the stretch of wooden walkway. Your resolve weakens after the second or third store as your children have worn you down with constant begging for you to buy them all the souvenirs they see around them. You need help finding a t-shirt in a smaller size and ask one of the store clerks for assistance. The young woman who helps you seems to you much like any other young American working on summer break, until she speaks. Then you realize she is, yet again, another foreign student here on break. She is nice enough to tell you she comes from Colombia and is enjoying her time here, but would like it better if she didn’t have to share a room with so many of her fellow students or ride her bicycle so far to get to work. She says that American drivers are crazy, and she feels much safer on bike paths back in her hometown of Medellín. She is also a bit tired of Americans constantly bringing up events from before she was even born, like Pablo Escobar and her country’s history with the cocaine cartels and some television show called Narcos that everyone keeps mentioning; but she does not tell you this. She is relieved you did not say anything about it and after she finds the right shirt for you and politely takes your money, you are off to ride some rides and eat ice cream. It seems like half of the ride attendants and ice cream scoopers are also young foreigners. You start to wonder just why there are so many of these foreigner workers around you doing the kinds of jobs you did when you were at that age. Are there not a ton of local kids that should be doing this work? You’ve heard about foreign workers coming in to take jobs in the software industry due to shortages of enough people with computer skills in the United States. But these are entry-level jobs, or at least the kind that don’t really require any special education. Is this even legal? Could they be undocumented? You know all the stereotypes about undocumented workers in hotels and restaurants. Aren’t they usually from Mexico? None of these people you have met seem to fit the mental profile that the media and society has shaped of undocumented workers at all. But even as these thoughts enter your head, they quickly dissipate as you see your children are having the time of

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1 An Introduction

their lives on the tilt-o-whirl. You are going to join them for the next round of rides and then you will all head back to your nicely cleaned room to get some rest. You’ve got a busy day at the beach planned tomorrow.

Be our Guest, be our Guest The above narrative may feel familiar to anyone who has spent time at a beach in the United States over the past 15 years, if they have been paying attention. While fictional, the portrait of a place that is dependent on the income earned during only portion of the year to make it throughout all twelve months is very real. The locations might change. The specific local climate and topography will vary, but as one travels around the country in touristy areas, one can feel a similar sense of place. With adjustments to the location or the composition of people who comprise the workforce, it could be one of many other seasonal tourism-dependent places throughout the United States. The time of year may even change. Instead of a beach resort at the ocean, it might be a town tucked away in a mountain valley dotted with ski lodges and rustic hotels. Perhaps it may be the cold winter weather and snowfall that attract the tourists or maybe it begins earlier as people flock to take in the changing palette presented by autumn leaves. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Jackson, Wyoming; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Park City, Utah; Gulf Shores, Alabama; Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin; Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Mackinac Island, Michigan; Aspen, Colorado; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Branson, Missouri; Bar Harbor, Maine; Hilton Head Island, South Carolina; Outer Banks, North Carolina; Destin, Florida; Moab, Utah; Ocean City, Maryland; Sandusky, Ohio. The list could continue to fill this page. But this is not the same sort of placelessness that has infected suburban shopping corridors and freeway exits nationwide, with every fast food restaurant or store roughly replicating every other in every location. Indeed, while some display elements of what could best be described as “tourist traps,” catering to lower-wage tourists, others are altogether more exclusive in their character, attracting a more refined clientele. In these places, the tourist cores often exhibit unique attractions, natural wonders, food establishments, or shopping experiences that serve to spur touristic demand. Whatever differences can be found among various seasonal tourism towns that dot the country, one commonality they do share is that most jobs are primarily service-oriented and largely temporary. From town to town, mountain valley to beach, each of these communities is connected by a certain remoteness and similarity of purpose. If one is present during the heights of the tourist season and pays attention, it is in these souvenir shops, restaurants and recreational attractions that they will likely find that many of the workers providing them service are not American citizens, but rather foreign nationals. A young Turkish man attending to arcade games, an Irish woman serving tables at the local restaurant, a Jamaican woman

Be our Guest, be our Guest

5

cleaning hotel rooms; each would be equally likely to be seen in any of the places listed above. From shore to hinterland, the cross section of the workforce in these seasonal tourism-dependent places would feel remarkably similar. Here one is equally likely to see foreign nationals used to supplement citizen workers who themselves may or may not actually live in the communities where they work. The short story is that many of places in the United States where people travel for holiday have experienced a transformation over the past 20 to 30 years. Due to a myriad of combining factors, those places that are the most remote and/or most seasonal, have slowly added guestworkers from other countries to their yearly routine of labor recruitment. They are able to do so because the government of the United States grants a certain number of visas to foreign citizens every year to legally enter the country for the purposes of work. While several “non-immigrant” visas allow people to come to the United States for temporary work, two of these in particular are heavily used across the country by seasonal tourism operators to fill gaps in the local labor markets. These are the H-2B and J-1 visas. Both were initiated for specific purposes. The H-2 visa was created in the early 1950s to allow managers to hire foreign temporary seasonal or unskilled workers in all manner of jobs, although it was primarily used to hire agricultural workers. Later in 1986 it was split into two visas, the H-2A for agricultural work and the H-2B for nonagricultural work. The J-1 visa was created in the 1960s as part of a wider Cold War era diplomatic effort to create programs for foreign nationals to come to the United States for cultural exchange. Over the decades, J-1 programs have allowed people from other countries to experience life and work in the United States in various types of jobs and institutions. The most prominent of these is the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program created to allow international students enrolled at foreign colleges and universities to spend their annual break working in the United States. With different rules, regulations, and aims, each visa fills a niche role in the hiring strategies of many business owners and managers. The result in many places today is a mixed roster of largely foreign nationals, minorities, and young American workers who sustain these seasonal economies and make the leisure of those who visit possible. Of course, seasonal tourism is not at all a new phenomenon. People have been traveling to the beach, mountains, or similarly seasonal locations on short trips for well over a century in the United States. And in that time, the hotels and resorts that hosted the travelers required a temporary work staff that would be let go when demands no longer dictated they were needed. Yet, foreign guestworkers were not the ubiquitous presence in tourism industries 40 or even 30 years ago that they are today, despite the fact that both the H-2 and the J-1 visas had already been established for decades at that point. For the most part until recently, seasonal tourism workers were found either in their own communities or at least from somewhere else within the country. The J-1 and H-2B visas at that time were seldom utilized, at least for tourism work. But since the 1990s, tourism managers have increasingly turned to the use of guestworkers in order to remain fully-staffed through their busiest times of year.

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1 An Introduction

180000 160000 140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 0 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 H-2B

SWT

Figure 1.1: J-1 Summer Work and Travel & H-2B Issuances 2002–2020. Data Source: H-2B, Department of State FY1997-2020 NIV Detail Table; J-1 SWT, adapted from Bowman and Bair (2017).

In 1997, over 22,000 students came to the United States through the Summer Work Travel program. A decade later in 2007 that number had ballooned to over 152,000 (see Figure 1.1). While the number dipped a bit during the worldwide economic downturn shortly after the 2008 peak, today it steadily remains around 105,000. This number would likely be much higher except for a cap placed on the total number of SWT participants in 2011. The H-2B has witnessed a similar explosion in the same time frame. In 1997, just under 16,000 H-2Bs were issued in total. By 2003, the total number of H-2B issuances were exceeding 75,000, peaking at almost 95,000 in 2008. This number may also have gone much higher were it not for a similar cap on the annual visa issuances written into the regulations. While the H-2B saw similar declines during the global recession, it too saw a massive resurgence in demand and by 2019 had found a new peak. Only the recent COVID-19 pandemic blocked the continuance of this trend, as the 2020 season had begun with the government already swamped with its usual set of visa applications. While these numbers are not specific to tourism or tourism-related industries, they represent a significant portion from each visa. This is particularly true for SWTs who today work predominantly in seasonal tourism-dependent areas compared to the H-2B where hospitality jobs represent a lower though not insignificant proportion (see Figure 1.2). The question looming over all of this is how and why guestworkers have come to be a major portion of the typical labor workforce arrangement in so many specific, yet distant and spatially diffused locations. One thing is certain, it did not happen overnight. The shift from a mostly local workforce to one that heavily incorporates a temporary supplement of foreign workers slowly evolved over decades. Indeed, the

Be our Guest, be our Guest

7

Figure 1.2: J-1 and H-2B Guestworkers 2021. Source: Map by Author. Data Sources: J-1, Adapted from Summer Work and Travel Participants Map, U.S. Dept. of State, Accessed July 2021; H-2B, Dept. of Labor Disclosure Data, 2021. H-2B data selected to reflect only positions associated with tourism and hospitality.

confluence of factors that contributed to this transformation forms a large portion of the analysis in this book, but the implications of resorting to guestworkers to deal with labor shortages goes well beyond simply understanding why they have become so integral to seasonal tourism operations. Were that the only issue of concern, guestworker policies would scarcely be a topic of discussion outside tourism management, or human resources journals, or among industrial professionals. In practice, however, a politics surrounding guestworker programs has slowly emerged alongside their heavy use in seasonal tourism areas. In essence, the H-2B and J-1 visas have in recent years become mostly a topic of public discussion at the local level, where their impacts are most acutely felt, rather than and at the national level where it is safe to say most Americans have likely never heard of the J-1 or H-2B visas.

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1 An Introduction

At the local level, if the stories published about guestworker visas in newspapers can be seen as something of a barometer measuring the interest in the topic, then it is clear that over the past decade many places have seemed to suddenly awaken to the fact that so many foreign workers live and work in their midst. Furthermore, this press coverage not only reveals the growing awareness of guestworkers, but also that they have come to be seen by many local businesses and chambers of commerce as an integral piece in the economic equation that governs the logic of contemporary seasonal tourism. To those with a vested interest in maintaining the flow of workers who can be easily employed on a temporary basis, these guestworker visas are to be protected from downsizing or elimination at all costs. Equally important, however, is that many of these articles by local investigative journalists in conjunction with worker and immigrant advocacy groups have also revealed the dark underbelly sometimes associated with both the J-1 and H-2B visas. In many places they have served to shed light on the abuses that guestworkers have felt when subjected to the whims of unscrupulous employers, labor brokers, or landlords who seek to take advantage of their precarity. That both visas have been implicated at times in human trafficking cases has only created greater scrutiny and skepticism regarding the value of their use. Unsurprisingly, such reports taken together help to inform public sentiment among the body politic that now ranges wildly between support for expansion of guestworker visas to outright condemnation and calls for their end. Among the latter now exists an interesting if unlikely comingling of far right and far left politics and political actors in the United States that outwardly display vitriol for both programs. For example, Democratic Senator and liberal firebrand Bernie Sanders has been among the most vocal opponents of guestworker visas, criticizing them for both enabling the exploitation of low-paid workers and taking jobs away from Americans (Trottman, 2016). The rhetoric on the other end of the political spectrum is remarkably similar with conservative Republican legislators such as Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley working with Democratic Senators Dick Durbin and Richard Blumenthal in making calls for major reforms. They are joined by a litany of anti-immigration think-tanks and lobbying groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that hope to see lower migration to the United States in general. Both CIS and FAIR have been characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups. This is not to say that each side of the political spectrum wants to see an outright end to the programs, but that each sees a need for at least major reforms before any expansion of guestworker programs should be considered. It is rather in the middle of the political spectrum where the programs as they currently exist seem to have their strongest support. This is especially true of legislators who represent areas that receive a high percentage of J-1 and H-2B visa holders, and who are consistently lobbied by those with vested interest in keeping the access to foreign workers open. In this way, despite an era of intense political divisions, both sides of the aisle consistently work together.

Be our Guest, be our Guest

9

In contrast, academic interest in the topic of guestworker visas as they have been used in tourism industries in the United States has been far less apparent, or at least slow to emerge. It is hard to say why this has been the case but the status of the research on labor in tourism may provide a clue. On one hand there has been a well acknowledged lack of attention to tourism work and workforces in general (Baum, 2015; Baum et al., 2016; Ioannides et al., 2021; Ladkin, 2011). This is altogether surprising considering that tourism work is particularly labor intensive and directly tied to the ability of tourism service providers to adequately cater to their customers. Some explanation may lay in the fact that tourism studies is an altogether expansive field reflecting that the tourism phenomenon itself is massive and complex. As a result, the breadth of research topics is wide and any individual avenue of inquiry may want for a satisfactory level of scrutiny. But as Baum et al (2016, p. 1) have argued, some of this lack of focus may be due to well entrenched perceptions of tourism work, “addressing characteristics of employment across tourism’s sectors, for example low entry barriers, mobility, seasonality, and challenging working conditions.” In their estimation, these seemingly intractable preconceptions about tourism labor dampen the enthusiasm for research into an area that seems settled or has failed to produce many solutions to ongoing problems associated with tourism work. Whatever the case may be, clearly there is a need for more research on labor issues in tourism, from those that focus on the quality of work and the status of tourism job markets, to the lives of workers themselves and the conditions in which they toil. Research on guestworkers and guestworker programs as they exist around the world in other industries are more readily available. Several famous examples have received a good deal of scholarly and journalistic attention. The West German Gastarbeiter program in place from the 1950s to early 1970s that brought in workers from Turkey and the rest of Southern Europe still receives attention for its legacy in helping to establishing present day Germany as a multicultural state with all the associated political ramifications. Also, the ongoing foreign worker programs of the gulf states in the Middle East have been continually scrutinized both due to the sheer volume of the mostly South and Southeast Asian workforces relative to the populations of the host countries and the widespread allegations of workplace abuses that the workers have been subjected to over the years. Meanwhile, in the context of the United States, studies on the J-1 and H-2B visa, are fairly rare across most academic fields. The most attention that has been given to either visa program has been in the realm of legal studies, especially migration law. Much of this work focuses on the critical area of worker protection, legal histories of how the guestworker visa programs emerged to take their place in various industries in the United States, and on how they may best be reformed (DiSanto, 2018; Durkin, 2013; Maitra, 2012; Mathes, 2012; Medige & Bowman, 2012; Pickral, 2008). Some notable examples also exist in humanities and social sciences that provide valuable insights into the establishment and evolution of the programs. Labor

10

1 An Introduction

historians Cindy Hahamovitch and Kitty Calavita have both researched deeply into earlier programs that became the foundation for the H-2 visas that emerged later and provide valuable insights into the role of the state in securing access to foreign labor to meet the needs of capitalist business interests (Calavita, 2010; Hahamovitch, 1997, 2011). These studies have laid important groundwork into showing both the legal mechanisms by which guestworker programs came into being but are also notable examples of work on labor migration and the relationship between state policy and labor mobility. Rural studies scholar David Griffith (2006) provides one of the best examples of research into guestworkers as it has existed in the past 20 years. His focus on the H-2B program and the lives of the Mexican and Jamaican workers who have been the most heavily utilized by various industries is one based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork and offers a perspective that gives voice to so many of the people who have come to the United States to earn a living. While this work covers the H-2B program as a whole, which includes seafood processing, landscaping, and forestry, a significant portion examines the experiences of Jamaicans working in hotels and resorts in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a place and group of people I likewise spent a great deal of time working with in my own research. In this respect, Griffin’s research feels was very close to home, so to speak, literally and figuratively. Indeed, much of the portrait he painted 15 years ago still holds true today. In many cases, such as the deepening shortage of hospitality workers and affordable housing, they have only become more acute and intertwined with the growth of the H-2B. Meanwhile, non-legal J-1 research is even more rare. Aside from a set of papers I have produced in my own research prior to writing this monograph, there are only a couple notable examples. One is provided by Dias, who provided a glimpse of working life among guestworkers at a Vermont ski-lodge. Through participatory observation by taking a job at the resort, Dias (2013) used ethnographic methods to highlight the differences between how foreign workers on the J-1 identify differently as workers than those arriving on the H-2B. In their accounting of the Summer Work Travel program from its establishment until today, Bowman and Bair (2017) provided one of very few and likely best examples of J-1 research into the evolution of the visa from one meant for cultural exchange to one that feels distinctly more like a work program. It is of note that neither article was published in tourism studies journals, further suggesting the disciplinary blind spot in which guestworker research resides. Despite these notable, if singular, examples, there is still a larger story to tell about guestworkers and their role in contemporary tourism in the United States. This became ever more apparent to me the more I extended my own research into the H-2B and J-1 visas. Over the course of publishing two articles on the subject, one from the perspective of human resources managers (Terry, 2016), the other from the perspective of workers and those who seek to advocate for their protection (Terry, 2018), my own investigations into the topic also helped me to understand the limitations that seem to exist in the way that most hospitality and tourism

Tourism and Labor Geographies

11

studies research tends to approach this or most topics. For the most part studies on guestworkers in tourism have been with a focus on managerial aspects of utilizing temporary foreign labor (Taylor & Finley, 2008, 2009, 2010). This is not to say that studies that help managers to better understand how to incorporate temporary foreign workers into resort operations are not valuable. Indeed, helping guestworkers to feel more supported and attuned to customer needs in the local context are beneficial to the industry and likely as well for the development of worker skills. But they do little to give a full accounting of why the programs have become so entrenched in the seasonal tourism landscape, what impacts they have on the surrounding communities, or how they can be understood as reflections of large scale societal trends at various geographic scales. With this in mind, I have come to believe that viewing the H-2B and J-1 programs through a geographic lens provides the greatest opportunity to approach the topic from a variety of angles that are often overlooked in other academic fields as well as in the popular press.

Tourism and Labor Geographies There is a reason that tourism studies has in many ways found a second home in geography, perhaps more than any other discipline. Tourism is by its nature geographical. As an industry, it is primarily involved in connecting people and places across space, which is an interest at the core of geographic studies. While geography is a difficult subject to define as any graduate level student of geography knows very well, at its core it is a spatial discipline. It defies neat disciplinary boundaries and is as wide in its breadth of topical examination as there are topics to examine. While this creates some difficulties for the discipline in terms of making it a specific home to many topics of study, the ability to take a holistic view is an element of strength that comes with geographic analyses. As an integrative discipline, geography provides the space to pull together ideas and evidence from multiple disciplines in order to make analyses that connect ideas and elements that are otherwise missed when academics stick to their disciplinary silos. Thus, in many ways tourism geographers are positioned to consider and incorporate multivalent work in ways that few practitioners in other disciplines are equipped to handle. It is not a surprise that between 1970 and 2007, over a third of the most highly cited tourism scholars held graduate degrees in geography (Hall & Page, 2009) and that several geography journals are continually ranked among the top quartile of tourism journals, which no other discipline can claim. When tourism geographers are at their best, we get a sense of the context in which spatial relationships associated with the delivery and experience of tourism play out across the world. Furthermore, we can understand how and why these spatial connections emerge. We get a sense of why they are important and why one thing happening in one place is more often than not related to other things happening in other places.

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1 An Introduction

Perhaps it is the ill-defined boundaries of the geography discipline that has made geographers among the most comfortable to dip their toes into studying tourism and hospitality. Tourism studies itself is amorphous, and often found wrestling with defining the boundaries of the tourism industry, going so far as to raise the question of whether or not we should really be talking about tourism industries, each with their own specific circumstances (Leiper, 2008). In that regard I tend to land squarely on the side of recognizing the incredible diversity of the multitude of activities that comprise tourism, going so far as to name my own course Tourism Geographies. The difficulty of delineating what comprises the tourism industry necessarily creates a conundrum when attempting to build research agendas about tourism labor. What does it mean to be a worker in tourism? In many ways this is a trickier question than one might imagine. There are obvious cases where we can just know that a worker in a hotel or a ski resort is involved in serving tourists. But what about others who do work in trades that are either partially connected to tourism or are what we might call tourism adjacent? Is someone maintaining fairways at a golf course attached to beach resort working in tourism? Is an airline mechanic a tourism worker? Can we consider someone working deep in the bowels of a cruise ship without any interaction with passengers to be laboring in tourism? Obviously, these jobs are related to travel or maintenance of a touristic location, but they may not be what we typically think about when tourism comes to mind, especially if it is a type of job that is transferable to other industries. Yet on the question of defining who is and isn’t a tourism worker, I will readily leave the question to those who are more compelled to take up that challenge. To be perfectly honest, I have never been particularly interested in cataloging tourist typologies or specific types of tourism activities in the way that many tourism scholars seem so invested. The reality is that work is often so specific to the local case or to local aspects of tourism that it would be an impossible task to try to demarcate industrial boundaries so neatly. Luckily, for the purpose of this work and in terms of the sort of tourism geographies that are examined here, neat classifications do not really matter. Many of the workers that are the subject of this project are indeed the classic tourism and hospitality worker: servers, cooks, room cleaners, etc . . . But many others are doing work that could be performed anywhere, such as those selling clothes in retail stores or bagging groceries. What is critically important, however, is that all of this work is being done in locations that fit a certain tourism profile. More specifically, these are jobs that are performed in areas that are heavily reliant on seasonal tourism as the main economic engine and that frequently are found away from major population centers. In a nutshell, this is about the geography of work in tourism, and understanding a multiplicity of factors that shape tourism employment in specific locations in the United States. It is about understanding how so many places that have become dependent on seasonal tourism have also come to rely on the temporary migration of foreign workers to be able sustain themselves. Thus, it is worth taking a moment to consider place as a geographical concept.

Place

13

Place The simplest way to define places is that they are locations with a biography. Strictly speaking, location simply refers to a point in space. Humans have developed various means of mathematically orienting and assigning specific values to locations on the Earth that make them easily findable. For example, the system of latitude and longitude that we are all familiar with is a common way to determine location. However, locations themselves are not places. Place is the result of human beings assigning value to locations and creating meanings from their environment. They are the product of humans living in a location and doing all the things that humans do that ultimately transform them into something meaningful. Despite acknowledgement that place can be a somewhat slippery concept, geographers have made valiant attempts to nail it down. For example, Agnew (1987) defines place in terms of three basic constituent parts: location, locale, and sense of place. Location refers to specific points on the earth that are intimately related to other places on the earth. Locale references the contextual setting for social relations. Sense of place is the feeling associated with the experience of living or being in a particular place. Understanding places in this way is particularly useful in explaining their role in tourism. Tourism locations are necessarily physically situated, perhaps unique or exquisite in their physical characteristics relative to other locations, and they are the site at which touristic production and consumption happen. Tourism is also in so many ways about the experience of place, or of a particular feeling that a place exudes. When someone goes to a place like New Orleans they will be soaking in the architecture, music, street life, Cajun food, and other cultural elements that make the city such a singular place. Experience is important as it brings together place as a complex concept involving spatial relationships of human activity as it exists in space, but also suggests the importance of the element of time. Experience and time are brought together in the form of memory. Memory involves the remembrance of experiences incurred in places, a recovery of time that denotes a reclamation (if only temporary) of place. This is an obvious key feature of the post-trip in which the vacation experience of place is cemented in memory. But time is also fundamental in that places are in a constant state of construction and reconstruction through constant human action. In other words, as place is forged from space, it happens in time. So, places which share identical locations cannot be the same place at different times. A place at one moment in time will be a different place at another because things have happened there that have continually reshaped it. Anyone who has returned to the place where they grew up after a great deal of time has passed only to feel discomfort at so much change feels this in their bones. All this is to say that places are locations with a cultural biography. They are produced by humans in the social world, “the sedimentation of these practices over time” (Castree et al., 2004, p. 64). This social constructionist approach to conceptualizing place requires recognition of the social

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1 An Introduction

processes that undergird the creation of places in addition to their particularities (Cresswell, 2004). Because we know that among many things, tourism is a social force (Deery et al., 2012; Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006) it is at least in part responsible for shaping the places it touches. How tourism becomes embedded in the fabric of any particular place is variable. Tourists are motivated by a myriad of factors. Sometimes it is because built within the cultural biography of places is a significant event that transforms an otherwise non-descript place into hallowed ground. Such is the case with numerous preserved battlefields or memorial sites. One example is in downtown New York City at the site of the formal World Trade Center towers that commemorates the people who died on September 11, 2001. They become sites of pilgrimage. But in many other places the transformation into a site of interest to tourists involved an evolution over time. Many of the places we consider today that are almost defined by their tourism profile were not places of leisurely consumption in their past. Often the memory of the former industry that has shuttered due to technological change or moved elsewhere with the shifting winds of global competition becomes the basis of tourism development. Thus, we see places like Cape Cod today that are able to capitalize on the memory of its long departed whaling industry as part of the overall allure of the region. While studying places necessarily requires an examination of local conditions to understand how they function and why they are structured the way that they are, this does not mean that they develop in isolation. Places develop in relation to other places and in connection to forces that exist at multiple scales, be they governmental, cultural, or economic. They are impacted by policies set by the state that may affect all who live in a country. They are also shaped by how they fit into the way that the global economy is structured. Still this list is not exhaustive but rather serves as a reminder of the multiscalar relationships that go hand in hand with placemaking. All of this has been to serve as a framework for understanding the nature of tourism labor markets as necessarily place-specific, and like places, they are influenced by multiscalar processes operating through them.

States of Labor and Tourism Mobilities Among the factors that shape places is the way that human mobility is implicated in the development and maintenance of tourism industries. Thus, we can speak of tourism mobilities as a general term that captures the multiplicity of forms of human mobility in the production and consumption of tourism. With this in mind, Hannam, Butler, and Paris (2014, p. 172) remind us that tourism mobilities should be seen as “integral to wider processes of economic and political development processes and even constitutive of everyday life.” For example, a place that relies on tourism necessarily relies on people traveling from other places, contributing to the

States of Labor and Tourism Mobilities

15

economic development of the region, which in turn plays a hand in governance and the establishment of policies that regulate, restrict, or facilitate their leisure. The rhythms of the tourists, the spaces they move into and out of, the customs they bring with them, all serve to shape everyday life in a tourism town. But in many places this is also the case with workers; something often or too easily overlooked. When we ignore the role of workers and their movement we risk leaving a gaping hole in our understanding of the spatial relationships that structure tourism and hospitality and the ways they shape particular places (Zampoukos & Ioannides, 2011). In this way, labor mobilities, and labor migration more generally, are critical to research in tourism geographies that seek to build deep understanding of areas dependent on seasonal tourism. Luckily an approach based in tourism geographies is well poised to take on this challenge considering that, “the increased awareness of the interplay between tourism and migration within the context of contemporary globalization, transnationalism and mobility is one of the strongest theoretical and empirical contributions of tourism geographers since the late 1990s” (Hall & Page, 2009, p. 6). Grappling with labor mobilities in tourism requires attention to the social formations that make the movement of people to perform work both possible and necessary. Migrants do not decide to leave their homes and work in an arbitrary location somewhere else on a whim. In most cases, people are motivated by forces external to themselves and go to specific places where work it available to them. Push and pull factors, those that either drive people to leave their homes or entice them to relocate to a particular place, do not exist in a vacuum. They are the consequence of a variety of personal, economic, and political realities that serve to create the conditions that make people feel the need to leave for work or create the structures to facilitate that movement. There is not one thing that serves as a push factor as they are highly dependent on personal circumstances. Generally speaking, however, labor migrants typically experience a lack of local opportunities to work and therefore opt to leave for places where jobs do exist. The reasons that unemployment is high and work is not available locally are the very factors that serve at least in part to create mobility. More often than not, such conditions are the result dislocations associated with economic change. In contemporary capitalist society, cultural, economic, and political transformations associated with the investment or disinvestment in places are two sides of the same coin and may determine if the amount of workers in a local workforce represent a surplus or shortage. For example, the penetration of capital into peripheral regions, and the changes it forges have often served to displace many people around the world from customary livelihoods (Massey, 1999). Such dislocations create for people a choice between trying to find local work in a place where jobs are in short supply and wages are low or inserting themselves into international labor markets that may take them far from home.

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1 An Introduction

Take, for example, the case of Jamaican labor migration to the United States. Jamaica is a place that has undergone dramatic changes to its economy over time, most notably in the 1990s and 2000s when IMF structural adjustment programs forced it to lower trade barriers as a condition of receiving financial assistance. The lowering of import duties and other tariffs that served as a means of protecting the national economy from international competition served to decimate many industries that could not compete with the influx of highly subsidized imports from wealthier countries. Also, during this time, the WTO ruling to end Europe’s preferential quota system for African, Caribbean, and Pacific bananas, made at the request of the United States on behalf of the major fruit corporations, left that industry non-competitive in the international marketplace. These neoliberal reforms along with currency devaluations were made in the interest of creating an infusion of foreign investment capital. However, the result has been massive jobs losses in traditional industries, leaving tourism as one of the largest sectors of the economy. With high unemployment and low wages, many Jamaicans feel forced to seek work abroad. Jamaica now ranks tenth among the countries most dependent on remittances sent home by its migrant labor force, which now comprise over 22% of its GDP (World Bank, 2020). In short, global economic change and the unevenness of globalization have resulted is the creation of a mobile workforce. But a mobile workforce requires a place to go. This is the other side of the coin. In other parts of the world where places have been transformed through cycles of investment and associated socio-political changes, labor markets also experience concomitant changes. A place in the midst of economic growth or changes that require new workers with different skills, may serve to attract workers with abundant jobs and higher relative wages. These are the pull factors that entice migrants to join a community. However, the mere presence of work to be done does not guarantee that new migrants can find their way to where the jobs are located. Knowledge of job availability in distant places, and the support of institutions and people who remain behind all play a role in facilitating or hindering mobility. “Moreover, guestworker programs, according to Burawoy (1976), function as a parasitic phenomenon: families and communities in origin countries bear the costs of social reproduction while host countries claim the profits and enjoy unfettered labour control.” (Sawchuk & Kempf, 2008, p. 495). Understanding mobilities has us consider the ways that these guestworkers are in a sense “tethered” to their places of origin through familial connections. This is to say that labor mobility to some extent hinges on the immobility of actors that serve to enable the mobility of others. In this vein, Hannam et al (2006, p. 3) suggest that, “mobilities cannot be described without attention to the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable motilities.” These “moorings” may take many forms, but the term itself suggests that mobile workers remain figuratively attached to the people, places and institutions that make their mobility possible. One example lies in the way workers are recruited to go

States of Labor and Tourism Mobilities

17

abroad. Often potential migrants learn of opportunities to work in other countries through “economic entrepreneurs” who serve as gatekeepers to jobs: labour importation schemes are often managed by a migration industry composed of entrepreneurs who variably incentivise, facilitate and sustain cross-border mobility, extracting economic benefits. States legitimate the participation of migration entrepreneurs in the export and import of foreign workers through licensing and monitoring systems and devolve the dayto-day management functions to these actors, leading to varying forms of co-governance. Migration entrepreneurs also work at the behest of employers and migrants. To employers, brokers offer the recruitment of workers, selecting, mobilising and socialising them into the expectations of the job, modulating their aspirations and monitoring their behaviour on the job. To migrants, intermediaries facilitate cross-border mobility and access to jobs. (Hernández-León, 2021, p. 3)

For better or worse, labor recruiters and other intermediaries that act as labor brokers serve as a link between workers and employers by playing the role of matchmaker. For example, the J-1 visa requires private non-governmental actors or institutions to act as a sponsor that is granted the authority to invite foreign students to the United States and bear responsibility for their travel to the country. Similarly, it is generally through labor recruiters that H-2B workers learn of available jobs and are then shepherded through the process of applying for the necessary paperwork required to obtain a work visa. Ultimately though, this is a role that is made possible by the authority vested in state institutions. One of the most significant barriers to migration are national borders and immigration policies that govern who may come to a country and for what purpose. This is not to say that borders are completely impermeable and that unauthorized migration does not exist; however, it is safe to say that the relative mobility of workers is in part determined by the migration status conferred on individuals through state institutions. Those without authorization may find their ability to move about freely constricted and their choices for employment disciplined as a result. That said, legal authorization does not automatically lead to unfettered mobility, as can be seen in the case of the H-2B visa, considering that those workers are effectively tethered to one employer only and may not legally work outside of the geographic area for which they were originally authorized. Guestworker programs are created and regulated by states and their bureaucracies as the chief means of temporarily mobilizing workers. States create the rules behind the importation of foreign workers, but do so in variable ways, sometimes with different importation schemes for different purposes. In short, the role of the state cannot be underemphasized in the creation of tourism labor mobilities. Guestworker programs and immigration policies in general are among the most obvious means by which states mobilize international migrant workers. The degree to which any particular foreign group finds themselves able to take advantage of these is largely determined by how legislatures and bureaucratic institutions decide to enact their policies. For example, some countries with imperial histories allow

18

1 An Introduction

former colonial subjects to immigrate with full rights to live and work. This is the case with some people in the British Commonwealth, although those rights have been altered over time and only apply in particular circumstances today. States may also play a role in mobilizing their own citizens for the purposes of emigrating for work. The most notable example of this is found in the Philippines where the government has created an entire wing of the state apparatus has been organized since the 1970s to facilitate the movement of its workers to go abroad. The Philippine Overseas Employment Agency was created to consolidate several agencies, but in general serves several purposes. These include streamlining the bureaucratic approval processes for emigrating workers, providing them with a minimum level of legal protections, and serving in the role of lead advertising agency promoting the hiring of Filipino workers. But there are less direct means of by which states may create the conditions for immigration. One may be in the form of refugee policies that serve a larger purpose than simply allowing people to migrate for work. In other cases, inadvertent side effects “which arise from the institutional and regulatory frameworks of labor market and wider public policies (e.g., welfare and social policies) that produce certain types of domestic labor shortages,” (Fudge & Tham, 2017, p. 2). In these cases, the pull factors that are created to draw in labor may be more symptoms of wider systemic effects than any specific attempts to facilitate the movement of labor or develop a group of mobile workers. All of this leads to the question of why states decide to set policies that facilitate the mobility of immigrants. Perhaps it is simply that states have a vested interest in maintaining or facilitating economic growth. A well-functioning economy is a key element in maintaining political stability and in promoting the general welfare of the population. But to what extent states operate at the behest of private business interests is something of an open question. An argument can be made that meeting the needs of a hegemonic capitalism has been at the core of how and why guestworker programs have emerged in many countries across the world. In the case of guestworker programs in the United States, Calavita (2010) argues that the action of the U.S government in administering the (in)famous Bracero program used to import agricultural workers from Mexico, it would seem that state actions were primarily to benefit growers and capital. However, as she also notes, it is much more messy than that as various government agencies often acted in line with their own policies and sometimes at cross purposes. This is to say that states have multiple priorities borne out in different ways across different agencies and these may or may not align as a single cohesive policy. Thus, a monolithic view of what states do is not particularly useful given the realities of governance and the institutional priorities that various individuals and agencies have surrounding programs.

Genesis and Methods

19

Genesis and Methods In some ways I should not be surprised that more academic attention in tourism studies has not already been focused on the H-2B or the J-1 visa programs. Even as someone who studies tourism and labor the topic came to me rather later than I care to admit. For several years, culminating with my doctoral dissertation, I had worked to understand the dynamics of the labor markets in the cruise ship industry. That project had taken me to the Philippines where I could meet labor recruiters, cruise ship workers and see the state apparatus that facilitated Filipino labor emigration with my own eyes. It is an industry that wholly relies on migrant workers who spend six to twelve months on board ships. At one point during that research project, I was traveling 100 miles to Charleston, South Carolina, from my home in Columbia, South Carolina, every Saturday so that I could meet with cruise ship workers when they came ashore during their weekly embarkation stop. Yet, I was completely oblivious to the fact that something similar was happening with land-based tourism all along the coast so close to where I was driving every weekend. My first clue, however, did come around this time during an interview with an attorney who represented cruise ship workers in claims against their employers. As we ate lunch in downtown Miami and discussed the use of workers from all over the world to staff the cruise ships, he stopped and pointed toward several hotels in view from the front window of the café. He proceeded to tell me that those places had learned the lessons of the cruise industry and were now doing the same thing; bringing in foreign workers. I remember being confused at the time, not understanding how this was possible considering they were inside the United States, not on ships flying flags of convenience that gave them the ability to hire a polyglot crew. It was only later that I came to realize he was talking about guestworker programs. My true introduction came while I was teaching. During a seminar while discussing labor migration, one of my students at the time described the situation at a resort hotel in the mountain town where he lived. He told the class of mostly Eastern Europeans that were housed a few miles down the road in a small village of prefabricated houses, but who worked at the luxury hotel. I began to ask more questions of this student when he also revealed that he knew the human resources manager personally. Through this connection I was able to meet and finally learn of the J-1 programs, specifically the trainee program that the manager had been using to bring in foreign hospitality students to work in the resort’s spa. At that point my surprise, both at my own lack of knowledge about the subject and the dearth of knowledge generated through tourism studies, left me hungry to learn more about the J-1. As I began to meet and speak with more human resource managers, I realized the equal importance of the H-2B program that these managers were often utilizing alongside or instead of the J-1 visa workers. In fairly short order I also learned about the concerns that many advocates and people in the communities had about the welfare of the workers on these programs.

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1 An Introduction

Between 2014 and 2017, I conducted interviews with managers and human resource directors at a number of hotels and resorts across the Carolinas. I was able to identify which companies had applied for and received foreign worker certification for the H-2B visa through disclosure data that is made publicly available by the Department of Labor (DOL, n.d.-a). This data also identifies any agents that may have helped the companies to submit their applications to DOL. This allowed me to find labor recruitment/legal service agencies to conduct interviews with several thirdparty intermediaries. Together this research became the basis for my first article that focused on the how both programs had been used in the industry to deal with seasonal labor shortages (Terry, 2016). This paper also first identified several issues that would continue to emerge as the research moved forward, in particular the struggle that managers found in finding housing for their workers. This particular concern was detailed in the next paper that dealt with the precarities faced by guestworkers in tourism (Terry, 2018). Much of the research for that paper was built from interviews with migrant labor advocacy groups, local volunteer groups that assisted J-1 Summer Work Travel participants, law enforcement, and workers themselves. Having published both of these papers, however, I came to realize that writing in such short form could never begin to explore the complexity of the phenomenon of guestwork in U.S. tourism. This made it difficult to feel any sense of satisfaction considering each paper had left out so much that needed to be addressed. Furthermore, while the topics were obviously connected, they covered such different ground and were published in different journals a couple years apart. Also, both papers had predominantly focused on the Carolinas, or at least the Eastern United States. Certainly there were larger questions to ask about how these programs have been utilized in other locations around the country, from the Mountain West, to the Midwest to the Northeast. In the meantime, both the J-1 and H-2B program have continued to evolve and garner more attention by local presses and politicians. Many of the questions that were being asked were similar to those I had started to ask, but had not really found an answer to yet. Among these was an overarching question of why exactly have we seen the precipitous rise in the use of guestworkers throughout the resort tourism industry in past 25 years? To get at these questions, I have extended the research I began in the Carolinas in 2014 to other parts of the United States where I have come to know that guest workers are heavily relied upon. Mapping the H-2B disclosure data after aggregating it with Summer Work Travel J-1 data found on the Department of State website helped me to identify which communities to target my efforts (see Figure 1.3). Once I had a short list of communities in a variety of areas around the country, I chose a few significant ones to visit and explore with my own eyes. Aside from continual trips to beach and mountain locations around the southeast (Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head, and Isle of Palms in South Carolina; Highlands, Maggie Valley and Morehead City in North Carolina, and Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in Tennessee). In June 2016, I traveled to Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, chosen for its heavy reliance on J-1 workers in particular, its midwestern

Genesis and Methods

21

location, and the unique attempts by its local government and citizenry to actively manage the annual influx of foreign students. In late November 2017, I traveled to Jackson, Wyoming, as a representative mountain west town, and a place that sports one of the most expensive housing markets in the country and a heavy reliance on guestworkers during cold and winter seasons. In May 2018, I traveled to Cape Cod and Nantucket, Massachusetts, which I chose as a representative northeastern seasonal tourism-dependent area. Nantucket in particular shares the dubious distinction of being one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, along with a heavy reliance on guestworkers.

Figure 1.3: Guestworker Hotspots by County 2016. Source: Map by author. J-1 Data from Summer Work Travel Participant Map provided at Department of State Website. Job descriptions are not included as part of this data and were aggregated based on place name. H-2B DOL disclosure data is publicly available for download. The H-2B data in this map was selected based on job descriptions corresponding to tourism and hospitality service positions and geolocated using ArcGIS. Both the J-1 and H-2B data were aggregated to perform hotspot analysis showing the most significant concentrations of guestworkers in tourism and hospitality in the United States.

In many of these locations I had the great fortune of meeting many people who work in and around tourism or in roles that may not be directly related to tourism but are associated with the factors that make guestworkers a necessity. In each of these locations, I interviewed a variety of stakeholders involved in managing tourism

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1 An Introduction

businesses, local government, affordable housing advocacy, and cultural exchange support. A good number the workers were working on the H-2B or J-1 visa. In most cases throughout this book, I have altered the names and personal identifiers associated with those who I interviewed. This is the case with all workers who agreed to speak with me. I also declined to audio record those interviews in order to ensure that they felt as comfortable as possible speaking to me. In many cases I did actively take notes while engaging with workers, except in instances where this would have created unwarranted distraction. In all such cases and with interviews in general, I did immediately document in my notes as much as possible immediately upon parting with subjects. Unfortunately while this allowed me to accurately record important details about the interviews, there are relatively few direct quotations from workers represented in subsequent chapters. But the ideas they expressed to me are incorporated in the analysis presented in this work. In some cases where those interviewed maintain a public presence with regard to the issues they spoke to me about, I have not altered their names. I also conducted follow-up interviews with many respondents by telephone and e-mail. Finally, I spent a great deal of time analyzing the regulations and ongoing changes to the regulations as they are published in the Federal Register.

Structure of the Book The goal of this book is to present a geography of guestwork in tourism and hospitality in the United States with an aim at understanding how it has emerged in specific areas across the country and what it means for tourism-dependent areas to also be increasingly guestworker-dependent areas. The next chapter focuses broadly on the nature of tourism work especially as it relates to seasonality and labor migration. Chapter three begins this exploration with a brief survey of guestworker programs established around the world in the past half century. This is followed by a history of international labor migration to the United States as it relates to the development of the earliest guestworker schemes, and how these subsequently laid the foundation for the contemporary H-2B program. The establishment of the J-1 program, which has a separate trajectory, is also detailed here. Chapter four establishes the genesis of the shift toward greater reliance on guestworkers in seasonal tourism in the United States. The discussion begins with a detailed description of one manager’s experience with labor shortages in the 1980s and 1990s and why this led her to become the first person in the state of South Carolina to utilize the H-2B and subsequently form a company to help other companies do the same. Throughout the chapter, I explore several causes for the changes in the seasonal tourism labor market as there is no single explanatory factor that can account for this phenomenon. The answer is complicated, stemming from socioeconomic shifts that slowly evolved the geography of tourism areas.

Structure of the Book

23

Chapter five provides a contextual exploration of two places in the United States, Cape Cod/Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Jackson, Wyoming, that are remarkably similar how they illuminate the ideas expressed in chapter four. While these two “Islands in the Stream,” one proverbial, one literal are as dissimilar in physical setting as one can imagine, both share a legacy of resource extraction, a shift to postindustrial economies, gentrification, and seasonality. Among the most pressing issues experienced by both is the lack of affordable workforce housing which reduces the availability of year-round housing for service and hospitality employees, and makes the stress of housing additional seasonal employees all the more acute. Having established the basis for how seasonal tourism-dependent areas have turned to guestworkers, chapter six explores how these two visas are actually used by the industry. Here the examination of the regulations is paired with human resource directors’ experiences of using them. The discussion establishes how the J-1 and H-2B visa rules establish distinctly different groups of workers in form and function. How the regulations, especially for the H-2B, serve to reinforce the ongoing labor market shortages without providing a means of addressing the root causes is also addressed. A discussion of housing difficulties met by managers in tourism areas at the end of chapter six leads into a discussion in chapter seven of how the lack of adequate housing presents one of the key precarities faced by guestworkers in the United States. In addition to introducing the variety of ways that guestworkers experience vulnerability, the chapter introduces a key stakeholder in the J-1 programs, International Student Outreach Programs. These volunteer groups are not only important for their role of enhancing the experience of J-1 Summer Work and Travel Participants, but also in playing the role of watchdogs over the students. Their contributions highlight both how a cultural outreach employment program can work at its best, but also how the program in many ways relies on their efforts, which in their absence risks descending into an exploitive guestworker program. That both programs have indeed experienced abuses informs part of the discussion in chapter eight regarding the politics of guestworker programs in the United States. Chapter nine establishes the multiscalar nature of politics and political action surrounding U.S. guestworker visas. At the national scale, discussion focuses on how the visas have been subject to revision following allegations of worker abuses and political action by migrant worker advocacy groups. It also provides description of how local politics is aimed at addressing the root causes of unaffordable workforce housing. The chapter concludes by showing how the H-2B visa has been utilized recently as an act of international diplomacy, ultimately aimed at mitigating the domestic political fallback associated with refugee arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border. Throughout the book, I am ultimately interested in places and how they emerge from the historical social, economic, and political relationships that serve to shape them. This approach is centrally important to understanding how places are continually reproduced as centers of tourism and places of work. Furthermore, if part of

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1 An Introduction

the task is to understand how local labor markets that have come to characterize seasonal resort areas are shaped, it is necessary to recognize that labor markets are embedded in places; they are by their very nature geographical. I write this as a reminder that when certain chapters of the book discuss topics like gentrification and the workforce housing affordability/shortage crisis that do not seem like they have much to do with tourism and hospitality, it is done to establish the local context in which guestwork is now embedded. Things like housing and transportation are necessarily related to labor markets and labor mobility. Similarly, I also seek to explore and understand how state policies shape the ways guestworker visas are structured and utilized, and what consequences they hold for foreign workers who arrive to work in this country. It is policies like these that serve to mobilize the migrant workforces that today help to sustain the places where they toil temporarily. As a further note, I do not seek to present guestwork in either a specifically positive or negative light, but to take stock of the factors that have seen it emerge as they are connected to wider society. As someone who has an admittedly natural preference for strong worker protections and workers’ rights, especially after conducting research into the cruise industry, I have worked hard to present analysis and facts based on evidence rather than descend into easy ideological positions. Thus, the contents of the book reflect a deep desire to portray guestwork and the lives of guestworkers in tourism in a way that all of the stakeholders I have interviewed for this project would recognize, even if they do not always agree with every part of the analysis.

2 Tourism Work, Seasonality, and Labor Migration in the United States Perceptions of Work in Tourism While I have refrained from strictly defining the boundaries between work in tourism and other sectors, it is necessary to confront the way that tourism jobs are typically portrayed both in academia and in the social world. One does not have to delve deeply into literature about tourism work to find well-worn descriptions of low-paid, insecure jobs, featuring unfavorable hours, racial and sexual discrimination and lack of career advancement. Of course, it is not true that all tourism jobs are awful, but this does not discount that fact that the discourse surrounding tourism work has a certain power in creating perceptions that are hard to shake. Regardless of whether they may be to a large degree grounded in reality, these constructions create a sort of stigma that creates challenges for those hoping to recruit workers. The reality is that tourism work suffers from a bad reputation. So why is this perception so dominant? First, tourism work, at least the part directly involved in front-line service work, is particularly labor intensive. Despite evidence that some high-end hotels have managed to de-intensify staffing in recent years (Melián-González & BulchandGidumal, 2020), in part through automation of certain functions, it is hard to imagine a near future where housekeeping, cooking, and many other hospitality roles are performed by robots. Indeed, for better or worse, when tourism is touted as a means of economic development, it is almost universally couched in the language of job creation (for examples see Dogru & Bulut, 2018; Elshaer, 2019). In many ways this is why it is such an important factor in tourism management, as well as why it is disappointing that more effort hasn’t been spent into studying it, at least beyond managerial perspectives (Baum & Szivas, 2008; Bianchi & Man, 2021). The reality of tourism work is that there is a great deal to know beyond how it serves as an input to business, although this too is crucial to any tourism enterprise. Luckily, a growing body of work has acknowledged this fact and we are now seeing increasing focus on the lives of workers and acknowledgement that not only the quantity of jobs but the quality of jobs in tourism is just as important. After all, if one of the main goals in supporting tourism development around the world is to drive employment, then the jobs that are created should at least be decent (Winchenbach et al., 2019). However, “decent” is not how jobs in tourism have typically been described. With acknowledgement that there are positions in various tourism industries that by popular standards are considered to be well-paid “good” jobs, such as those found in management, so much “grunt” work in tourism and hospitality is typically characterized by its low status, to the extent that it would be surprising to see it labeled any other way. Among the component factors leading to its poor reputation are https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-002

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2 Tourism Work, Seasonality, and Labor Migration in the United States

that tourism jobs have generally been classified as low wage and requiring low skill levels (Baum, 2018; Beer et al., 2014; Ladkin, 2011; Riley & Szivas, 2009; Robinson et al., 2019; Shaw & Williams, 2004; Szivas et al., 2003). While the question of skills requirements is worthy of debate, the issue of low pay is fairly well established. In a recent Brookings Institution – Metropolitan Policy Program report, Ross and Bateman (2019) identified several clusters of workers who comprise the United States’ 53 million low-wage earners. Contributing to their results, were ten occupational groups in which at least half of all of low-wage workers were concentrated. Retail sales, cooking, and food preparation, building cleaning, food and beverage service, and personal care/other service were among these and grouped together represent 25% of the entire low-wage labor force. But even more striking is that across those five occupational groups, all of which serve as the backbone for hospitality and tourism service work, 80% of all workers within each group are considered low-wage workers. Furthermore, this effect can be seen geographically in terms of local industrial composition. Areas that display concentrated hospitality industries tend to have a larger share of low-wage workers relative to other areas with other industrial concentrations such as health care or financial services. One of the explanations often used to explain why low pay persists in tourism and hospitality work is that the labor market should theoretically have an abundance of people ready to step into most positions which typically require few skills. Most of the service type work associated with tourism and hospitality is considered easy to access, and a surplus of available workers theoretically removes the necessity for employers to raise wages to attract job applicants (Riley & Szivas, 2009). However, this last point is more complicated in practice. As the topic of this book makes abundantly clear, there are many places, at least in the United States, where there is not necessarily a ready-to-go army of surplus workers and where wages have not risen in the way that might be expected to attract employees in a tight labor market. This seems even more of a conundrum considering that many of these same places have often struggled to find enough workers even in times of high national unemployment such as during the global financial crisis of 2008. Why would easy to access jobs go unfilled? The answer is of course complex. Aside from the issue of low pay, tourism work is also hampered by stereotypes that pathways to promotion are rare for entry-level workers and employee turnover is high (Shaw & Williams, 2002). In other words, they are commonly seen as deadend jobs. This sort of stigma was reflected on by Larry who manages a labor recruitment agency on Cape Cod: We’ve got $25 an hour truck driver jobs on Nantucket Island that I can’t sell. Nobody wants to do it. I feel like it’s almost gotten to the point where labor-related jobs, hospitality-related jobs have this stigma attached where if you’re not in a suit and tie in an office, if you’re not making the big, it’s almost like the jobs are looked down upon. A lot of it at the same time also is you’re dealing with an eight-month job where you’re not getting the benefits. You’re not getting the retirement. You’re not getting the perks of a full-time job. A lot of people are just

For Everything there is a Seasson

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glancing over those, expecting the big money office jobs. We’re noticing the trend, it’s definitely been on a downhill for quite a while. I think it’s gotten worse within the past few years.

Even if one can concede that not all positions are bad and many can be quite attractive in the right circumstances, it is entirely possible that qualified candidates avoid applying for open positions because of the social status that they carry. From the employers’ perspective, “the challenge for the industry is that many outside of the profession simply do not know how fulfilling and lucrative a career in hospitality can be. This lack of understanding has put pressure on the industry in many key markets and has contributed to a shallow labour pool because the industry is seen as unattractive and a stopgap measure career-wise” (Willie et al., 2017, p. 407). There is, however, an overarching problem that plagues the tourism industry in many of its sectors, in many of its places. It is that the work to be done is entirely dependent on touristic demand that is by its very nature ephemeral.

For Everything there is a Seasson Tourism in many places is a bit like a desert creek bed that lies dormant for much of the year until the moment when the rains finally arrive. And when they do the water comes in a torrent, crashing downstream suddenly with irresistible force, shaping the landscape, carving away as it flows. With time though, the rains depart for the year and the waters evaporate to leave behind once again a dry creek bed that marks the landscape but otherwise appears asleep. Many places throughout the world experience tourism in much the same way. During much of the year they seem like sleepy communities, with little obvious activity aside from the normal everyday functions found in any small town. But then at a certain moment in the year, tourists arrive. They may trickle in a first like in a small stream. But soon they rush in like a flash flood, and businesses best be prepared. Those who are not may feel so overwhelmed by the demands placed on them that it is as if they are drowning, struggling to keep their head above the surface of the river of tourists that has inundated them. I witnessed the scale of the problem of dealing with a flood of tourists on a short weekend trip to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, with my family during Spring 2021. While the town was not yet experiencing the massive influx that it would typically see in the summer months, it was clearly quite filled with tourists. On one hand, the inadequacy of the local infrastructure was conspicuous in the backed-up auto traffic on the main highway strip that connects all attractions and services over several miles in a narrow bottleneck. Simple trips out to get food from local restaurants, play miniature golf, or purchase souvenirs requires building in plenty of extra time since cars are often at a standstill. Congestion is also felt in communications, since the local mobile phone services simply cannot handle the amount of people utilizing their smartphones. This “normal” condition was confirmed to me

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by a restaurant worker who had altered the curbside delivery process by physically approaching cars to request order numbers since customers could not follow online check-in procedures due to data services that had slowed to a crawl. But perhaps the most telling experience was at another restaurant on a Thursday night when the labor shortages became very real to the customers. After ordering our food and arriving at the requested time 50 minutes later, I proceeded to wait in my car for another 20 minutes before going inside to inquire about the delay. Apparently, I was not the only one with a similar question as most of the other patrons waiting for their meals had similarly come inside to check on their order. I managed to speak with the food runner who was visibly stressed and had assured me that my food was on the way out, but that she was the only person working to deliver to cars. And then I never saw her again. A little bit later a manger arrived to assist and after being questioned by another group of customers demanding their meals, she informed everyone that not only were they short of staff to deliver food, but that the kitchen was also understaffed, and everyone was just going to have to be patient. She further informed us that the poor food runner had sat down in frustration and began crying under the weight of dealing with so many unhappy customers. She wasn’t coming back out. One could not help but sympathize with her. Having grown up working in restaurants I know very what it feels like to be “in the weeds,” like you are struggling just to keep your head above rising flood waters. Moments like this reveal the extreme pressures felt by everyone when demands run high but there are simply not enough workers to meet it. Such is the challenge of seasonality, the swings between high and low demand throughout the course of the year. Of course, there are some fortunate locations that are immune to the yearly cycles that oscillate between periods of peak demand and the lows of the off-season. Places like Las Vegas and Walt Disney World can expect tourist arrivals throughout the year with relatively minor variation. However, most places are not so lucky and most contend with the dramatic ebb and flow of tourists, usually in a cyclical pattern. Not surprisingly, this annual unevenness is often seen as a problem to be overcome (Duro, 2018; Duro & Turrión-Prats, 2019). A great deal of emphasis in the academic literature on tourism has focused on determining factors that contribute to seasonality, which is often due, although not exclusively, to seasonal weather patterns and school schedules. Areas associated with watersports and beach activities typically thrive in summer months, while others in the mountains might find peak demand in either the summer or in winter months when snow is present and winter sports like skiing and snowboarding are possible. Some places may be more unique or have extended “shoulder” seasons or separate peaks, such as the fall leaf season found in the Blue Ridge Mountains where people come to view the majestic changing color palette of the deciduous forests. Unsurprisingly, these demand swings have created the impetus for another large body of literature on seasonality interested in developing effective means of measuring it (Duro, 2018; Duro & Turrión-Prats, 2019).

Labor Market Flexibility

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But from the perspective of those who earn their income from tourists, the consistent struggle to find enough workers to stay afloat during the peak is a near-ubiquitous concern. For managers who operate in highly seasonal locations, maintaining quality customer service throughout the year translates to an annual challenge to not only find enough workers to fill open positions, but also to find quality workers. In areas with a small year-round local population, seasonality also creates a need for workers with particular skills (e.g. golf/tennis instruction, massage) that cater specifically to tourists and who consequently would not normally be needed locally during the off season (Baum, 2012a). Unfortunately, most of these workers will only be employed temporarily until the busy season subsides (Ainsworth & Purss, 2009; Jolliffe & Farnsworth, 2003). For workers, the end of the peak represents unemployment, and for managers it represents the loss of staff that they may or may not be able to recruit again the following season. As a result, seasonality is one of main reasons that labor turnover in tourism is so high.

Labor Market Flexibility The impact of seasonality on labor markets is profound. Many normal assumptions that are broadly stated regarding supply of and demand for workers in year-round industries bear little resemblance to what occurs in seasonal tourism and hospitality. Yet seasonality also creates an interesting parallel to industries that have found themselves seeking more flexibility in production. Much has been made of the historical shifts in manufacturing associated with post-Fordist or neo-Fordist restructuring as companies responded to macroeconomic crises and capitalist overaccumulation beginning in the 1970s to seek greater diversity in products and adaptability to consumer demand. This included the famous shift in supply-chain management to “justin-time” production whereby companies would reduce their parts inventory to instead rely on parts that would arrive at the factory only at the time they would be needed for assembly. This new manufacturing paradigm allowed companies to shift towards shorter but more diverse product runs to respond to the rapidly changing consumer culture trends. This created a need for a flexible labor pool that could work intermittently, often not being needed as a factory was retooled between production runs. The result has been the increasing flexibilization of labor markets to accommodate the swings in demand for labor that is less and less constrained by time and space (Villarante, 2006). One consequence of flexible production regimes has been the development of a dual labor market, whereby permanent, well-compensated positions are staffed by a relatively small core of trained or skilled employees, while a sizeable portion of temporary non-standard positions are created to cope with shifting demands. The ability to control staffing levels quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively is of obvious benefit to companies (Standing, 1999). As a result, various forms of non-standard

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work, characterized by individual rather than collective contracts and without fulltime benefits, have become common (Kalleberg, 2000, 2003; J. Peck, 1996; Standing, 1999; Storper & Scott, 1990). The move toward contractually-based ‘‘contingent’’ workers who can be hired or laid off as business cycles demand has been aided by the decline of labor unions and the liberalization of labor market regulations to allow the proliferation of temporary worker recruitment, often through third party staffing agencies (Belous, 1989; Carnoy et al., 1997; Coe et al., 2007, 2009; J. Peck et al., 2005; J. Peck & Theodore, 1998). This form of flexibility is primarily numerical in nature, but businesses also found that having workers perform a variety of tasks beyond rigidly determined job descriptions allowed them to increase employee productivity (Ioannides & Debbage, 1997; Kalleberg, 2003; Storper & Scott, 1990). Having functionally flexible workers allows businesses to reduce the overall need for workers by eliminating redundancies in the workplace. However in some cases the remaining positions became more complex, necessitating finding higher-skilled people who might better adapt to changing workplaces (Ozaki, 1999). Ultimately, these changing forms of labor were not isolated with manufacturing and other industries found themselves adapting to quick shifts in production, demand, and the benefits of keeping labor forces relatively lean until needed, a sort of “just-in-time” labor force. For seasonal tourism, the language and logic of labor market flexibility seems a perfect match, and for good reason; it is not really new. For as long as tourism businesses have hired workers to help them get through the peak only to let staff go for the off season, the logic of dual labor markets have applied. This shift has been global. Low-end service positions in cleaning (Aguiar & Ryan, 2009; Savage, 2006), and hospitality (McDowell et al., 2008; Tufts, 2009) have been made increasingly flexible, characterized by part-time, precarious, gendered and often migrant workforces, where in London this has become something of an industry norm (Lai et al., 2008; McDowell et al., 2007, 2009). In some cases, hotels have even turned to temporary staffing agencies in order to manage recruitment of peripheral staff, such as in Australia where hotel managers have come to rely upon temporary work agencies with a, “desire to enhance numerical flexibility, eliminate recruitment/selection and training/development costs, reduce costs associated with worker’s compensation and overcome the variable nature of labour costs” (Knox, 2010, p. 463). While flexibility has afforded managers an ability to overcome some of these challenges, it comes with its own cost, but one which is more typically borne by the workers rather than businesses.

Flexibility and is Discontents The benefits that labor market flexibility affords to businesses in the name of capital accumulation, must of course be tempered by the realities that being actually

Flexibility and is Discontents

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employed in flexible regimes represents for workers. In particular, work that is impermanent, temporary, or intermittent is by its very nature precarious. Jobs like this mean that employment is contingent on the presence of work to be done and that reductions in consumer demand or any pause in production are met with unemployment for peripheral, contingent workers who labor outside core business functions. The dual labor market thus serves the needs of capital as a hedge against cost imbalances in times of falling revenue, but the benefits that businesses see in the form of stable profitability are purchased in the form of insecurity by workers who cannot be guaranteed work in the long term. These workers comprise a significant portion of what Standing (2016) calls the “precariat,” a growing class of people who through casualization of employment, reduced benefits, and increased uncertainty, absorb greater risks at work and in society. Precarious work can be understood as labor that is “uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg, 2009, p. 2). Considering the rise of flexible work regimes around the world, academic research that focuses on the associated vulnerabilities faced by workers has burgeoned in recent years. This growing body of work acknowledges the multiple ways that precarity is constituted and reproduced in the workplace and social world (Lewis et al., 2015; Meehan & Stauss, 2015; Waite, 2009) While increased labor market flexibility plays a major role in this massive shift in how risk is absorbed in the labor marketplace, the story is a larger one than simply innovations in industrial structure and labor management. Precarity is also constructed through legal processes developed through government policies, regulations, and temporary work programs (B. Anderson, 2010; Goldring et al., 2009). How the state is implicated in facilitating changes to legal structures and regulatory apparatuses governing labor markets is also of central importance as these can either constrain or enable the proliferation of precarious work (Lorey, 2015). For those working in the most subordinate positions in the labor hierarchy, the neoliberal era associated with deregulation, laws that favor the decline of unionization rates, and an erosion of welfare state protections amounts to a time of increasing insecurity (Aguiar & Herod, 2006; B. E. Smith & Winders, 2015). How this ultimately plays out in disparate national contexts is variable. For example, in my earlier research into cruise ship work, I found that due to precedents set by decisions made in U.S. federal maritime court cases, Filipino seafarers lost their ability to bring lawsuits against cruise line employers for damages. The ability to sue in the U.S. courts for maintenance and cure in the case of injury was a long held traditional remedy dating back to at least the Middle Ages in Europe, and was available to workers on ships that regularly utilize American ports (Terry, 2009). Between various changes to labor laws regarding how arbitration agreements in labor contracts can be enforced and how judges decided to interpret those laws, cruise ship workers found themselves more vulnerable by law. Moreover, while the U.S. legal system and legislature had produced the laws and decisions that ultimately led to this condition, it should be noted that it is the Filipino state that inserts

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arbitration agreements and injury schedules into its standard seafarer contracts. These serve to protect the workers at a bare minimum, but also very much to serve the interests of capital by limiting the liability that anyone hiring a Filipino seafarer will face. This allows the Filipino state to promote the use of its migrant workforce, as a professionally mobile group of workers that also happens to be a very good financial deal for employers. The result is that workplace risks are mostly absorbed by Filipino workers, thereby reinforcing the lower status attached to their ethnicity. In other contexts, legal structures can serve to produce and perpetuate temporary work. Such is the case as in Australia, where regulations set the length of time prohibitively long (6 to 12 months) between when an employee can transfer from a job placement through a temporary agency to permanent employment with the client firm where they are placed. The result is more workers become trapped in the secondary labor market (Knox, 2010).

Not just dual, Segmented! While the language used to describe labor market flexibility has so far been described dualistically (primary/secondary, core/periphery) the realities of labor markets are that they are much more complex. The logic of the primary sector of labor markets still applies. These jobs do tend to be secure with good pay and benefits. However, the secondary sector in the real world is much more diverse, forming into segments throughout the labor market with varying degrees of security, pay, tenure and so on. And even more importantly, positions tend to be sorted among various groups of workers based on socio-cultural factors including race, ethnicity, gender, and social class. In this way, certain non-standard positions become heavily racialized or gendered and relegated to minority populations. Anyone who has spent any time even casually examining labor markets knows that groups of people tend to cluster in certain jobs and those positions deemed to be the worst by society tend to be occupied by the most marginalized groups. In the realm of tourism, this type of sorting is perhaps most visible in the cruise industry where the higher status officer and staff positions tend to be held by white Northern and Western Europeans, while lower status hospitality and deck and engine positions are filled by a myriad of workers from throughout the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, South, and Southeastern Asia. Each cruise line has its own particular history of recruitment from particular areas, but typically follow a pattern that reflects the colonial relationships established long ago by the nationalities of each company, and the colonizers are still on top (Terry, 2011, 2014). The same can be said of tourism labor markets everywhere. How these various segments within a working hierarchy are determined is highly geographical where particular localized social histories create patterns of inclusion, exclusion, and ranking. Thus, it is common in some parts of the United States to see African

Not just dual, Segmented!

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American women laboring as hotel housekeeping staff, in a continuation of both racial and gender norms that were established over decades or even centuries. In other parts of the country similar positions may find Latinx workers as the dominant group, especially considering that they hold about half of all maid and housekeeping positions across the county as a whole (Eggerth et al., 2019). Patterns such as these reflect a self-perpetuating discursive framing that marks certain groups as naturally suited to certain types of work or at least delineates who belongs in certain positions. Hospitality jobs in emerging tourism destinations in the United States often served as a first chance for women to enter the wage workforce, but also served to transfer traditional gender roles to the workplace (C. B. Martin, 2007). Hotels in particular help us to understand this process in which traditional gender norms associated with domestic life are inscribed upon the labor market: To the extent that hotels provide a ‘home away from home’ by offering essentially domestic services on a commercial business, hotel work may be regarded as quintessentially women’s work where traditional gender roles at home are mirrored at work. However, as Purcell (1993) points out, hotel work is stigmatized because of its associations with personal servitude. Indeed much hotel work may be regarded as carrying a social taint because of this and thus may be defined as ‘dirty work’. Women may predominate in certain hotel jobs, not so much because they are regarded as particularly appropriate for women, but because these jobs are regarded as appropriate only for those disadvantaged in the labour force. Certainly, the largest proportions of female workers are found in the lowest skill, lowest status and ‘dirtiest’ hotel jobs. Thus, men tend to be employed as managers or in craft or semi‐skilled position (such as chefs), whilst women are found in ‘operative positions’: chambermaids, cleaners, waiting and bar staff, unskilled cooks and kitchen hands. (Adib & Guerrier, 2003, p. 419)

Similar stories can be told regarding race in the United States, where the legacy of black servitude would be reinforced in labor markets well after the end of slavery. In Western North Carolina, for example, slaves had been utilized along with free black and white workers. And while at times even slaves were granted a great deal of responsibility in running inns, the cleavage in the types of positions held by black and white workers was highly visible in the many decades that followed the Civil War: This reliance on black labor is not surprising considering the nature of resort work. The work was difficult, the hours long, and the season short. Free blacks, especially women, had few choices of gainful employment in the southern mountains . . . The racial division of labor was quite stark. Black women found work as chambermaids, cooks, and waitresses. In 1900 seventy-eight black women worked cleaning hotel rooms in Buncombe, Henderson, and Haywood counties, whereas only fifteen white women held those jobs. Likewise, no black man held a managerial position in the region’s lodging facilities in 1880 or 1900, and only one, an Asheville boardinghouse owner, held such a position in 1920. Black workers also dominated the kitchen and dining room staffs, while white men and women filled positions such as hotel clerks, bookkeepers, and other administrative posts. (Starnes, 2005, p. 178)

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The legacy of ethnic and racial minority underrepresentation in management positions only continued over time. By the end of the 20th Century, almost half of all lodging positions were held by minority workers, while the same could only be said of under ten percent of executive board membership. Furthermore, the managerial positions where minority workers could be found typically did not feature pathways to upper-level advancement, thus entrenching white dominance in positions deemed most essential by businesses (Costen et al., 2002). Today the overall trends remain largely the same; “tourism was (and still is) dependent on the existence of a lowwage labor force that would accept menial, seasonal work” (Martin, 2007, p. 36). The segmentation of the tourism labor market in the United States can only be understood by considering how certain jobs have come to be stigmatized as “dirty” (Camp, 2011; Zampoukos & Ioannides, 2011) and over time firmly attached to social identities. This marriage between social positioning and perceptions of work is in some ways heightened in the history of tourism in the United States as the very presence of minority workers was often seen as an essential part of the tourists’ experience. For example, in Puget Sound, Washington, around the end of the 19th century, indigenous women were the primary labor force, seasonally migrating to pick hops. With time, a nascent tourism industry developed locally that brought urbanites to rural areas where they could witness these women at work in the fields. In essence, this labor both served to maintain agricultural landscapes for touristic consumption while their physical bodies became part of the landscape itself; the viewing of indigenous peoples at work came to be seen as part of the experience of place. Similarly, in other locations like the Southeastern United States, black men and women worked conspicuously in subservient roles that helped to cement their places in the racial hierarchy of the tourism workforce. From serving food and cleaning rooms to transporting tourists via foot-power in rickshaw-like “Afro-mobiles” the servitude of dark-skinned humans became a key feature of the Southern tourism landscape. This is not to say that such patterns were restricted to the South. Sundown towns, white-dominated communities that allowed people of color to enter during the day to perform work but forced them to leave by nightfall on threat of violence, were particularly common in the midwestern portion of the United States (Loewen, 2005; H. A. O’Connell, 2019). One has to consider the ways that the legacy of segregation in all its forms lives on in tourism towns today, especially when viewing shuttle busses filled with African American hotel workers arrive for the workday, delivering their passengers after having driven from mostly black communities an hour away. While the ways in which this racialized and gendered sorting would take place certainly varied across the country, depending on the particular racial and ethnic composition of local places, those deemed of lower social class were effectively funneled into lower status positions in tourism, while the reverse would be unusual or even unthinkable. Indeed the narrow range of economic choices afforded to them even in a free labor market limited the ability of minority workers to advance into

The Precarious Nature of Labor Migration

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other more lucrative and less precarious positions (Raibmon, 2006). This legacy can be seen today not only in the statistics of tourism and hospitality labor force participation rates, but also in the fact that representations of tourists themselves still often emphasize whiteness as the default. This remains the case in North Carolina, where black bodies were decidedly underrepresented in tourism brochures depicting consumers (Alderman & Jr, 2013). One must question how representations like this play in the social constructions of both who tourism and hospitality is produced for and who produces it. For example, in Hawaii since the 1960s “new immigrants” mostly arriving from Asian and Pacific Island countries became the primary workers in the lowest echelons of the resort labor market, performing the most menial tasks while advancement to management was mostly only available to local Hawaiian workers (Adler & Adler, 1999). Here the category of race was less of a factor in determining the social cleavages in the local labor market compared to many parts of mainland United States as the majority of the population is comprised of citizens who are considered racial and ethnic minorities. Rather citizenship, immigration status, time in the country, and skills play a larger role in the great sorting of workers. This serves as a reminder that the reasons that places turn to immigrant workers are multiple and contingent on local conditions, which makes sweeping generalizations explaining the cause for labor immigration as well as how it is structured in all places a difficult or unwise proposition.

The Precarious Nature of Labor Migration As the example of migrant workers in Hawaiian resorts suggests, the story of labor market segmentation is also bound up in the larger story of the historical movement of people and how this mobility plays a role in developing new layers in the complex web of social sorting in the workplace. In arriving in new places where they are conspicuously marked as “outsiders,” immigrant workers enter a world in which opportunities are opened to them, but only insofar as they are willing to do work that local workers are unwilling, unable, or simply reluctant to do for themselves. In this way, migrant workers tend to be among those most likely slotted into unsavory positions in the labor market in a something we might call a “migrant division of labor” (May et al., 2007). This is due at least in part to the fact that immigrants are among those that have been historically relegated to perform the “dirty work” to do in society. There is a great deal of irony in this considering some of what have been deemed the worst jobs are essential to society, yet confer on the workers the lowest status. Such work is often not only dirty, often dangerous as well. In accepting risky work, migrant workers solidify their position in the migrant division of labor. This is not to blame the workers, who often feel compelled to accept jobs that they most likely would not take if not desperate. Rather, in circumstances

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where they feel few choices exist but to leave and accept work abroad, they become mobilized by a sense of obligation to their families. Unfortunately, being tethered emotionally and/or financially to their homes also makes them more vulnerable. When they come from impoverished countries with high unemployment, they will accept levels of mistreatment and exploitation that would never be tolerated by local resident workers (Bauder, 2006). In other words, migrant workers are valuable because they are vulnerable. This may not even be something employers themselves recognize or deliberately attempt to exploit. Even if managers can only see the superior effort and dedication in the workplace compared to local workers, this is something they will naturally want to utilize, regardless of how their motivations are generated. Precarities are also based in the fact that migrants have been dislocated from the places they understand. They are often unfamiliar with the local language, local customs, and their rights as workers. This opens them up to abuse from people who recognize this and would seek to exploit them. But they are often vulnerable because state policies set them aside and may make them ineligible for labor market protections like unemployment benefits. Others tie them to individual employers, like in the case of the H-2B, which restricts their mobility, both figuratively and literally within a local labor market and effectively erodes their ability to negotiate their positions. In other words, as Bélanger and Tran (2013, p. 6) succinctly suggest, “temporary foreign workers are, in essence, in a precarious state due to their limited entitlement to social protection and their mandatory return, which prevents them from accessing legal and social citizenship” These are issues addressed in chapter seven. History is littered with examples of migrant workers who experienced the worst kind of imaginable abuses. Some of the most infamous examples of people relocating for work are of course various forms of forced labor. The most obvious would be those that involve chattel slavery and involuntary migration. Even in those cases that involved so-called “free labor” and voluntary labor migration it is very easy to find notorious cases of workers who were placed into positions with horrific working conditions often not knowing the realities of what they had agreed to do. Latin America, which had been host to several centuries of slaves imported from Africa to work on plantations and mines, provides a notorious example of the brutality often associated with international labor migration at the time. Between 1847 and 1874, over 100,000 indentured servants were brought to Peru as replacement labor for slaves who began to disappear as a workforce after the abolishment of the slave trade. These mostly Chinese “coolies” as they were called at the time worked on sugar and cotton plantations, building railroads, and as miners. Chinese workers at the time were mobilized as a workforce due to several factors. For one, China was suffering immense internal and external strife in the middle of the 19th century. Population pressures, massive unemployment, a weak imperial bureaucracy, as well as the Taiping and other rebellions, dislocated millions of Chinese citizens. Foreign interference best represented by the Opium Wars, served to force

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open Chinese ports to trade and create the space for foreign labor recruiters to entice desperate people to sign contracts to work abroad. They would often lure illiterate peasants to sign eight-year contracts promising them work in places like the California gold fields. Those who might not sign would often be kidnapped from taverns and held in human warehouses waiting to be sent to Peru on ships (Mann, 2011). The Chinese state was obviously opposed to such labor contractors, but was powerless to stop them at the time (Chinese Labor (Peru), n.d.; Hwang, 2013). Only later in 1874 was the Chinese state able to reestablish control and begin to execute them, ultimately leading to the end of coolie importation to Peru. Other factors included better sailing technologies that made the movement of workers easier. Pull factors of the time combined with these to draw now available Chinese workers to the Americas. Demand for labor at the time was not only strong due to the end of slavery, but also to build infrastructure projects like railroads. To try to meet this demand, the Peruvian state subsidized the importation of contract laborers by offering 30 pesos per immigrant for anyone who brought in more than 50 workers. Not surprisingly, this incentivized the unscrupulous behavior of labor recruiters in Macao. But importation was also incentivized by the payment of 300 peso for each slave that was freed after abolition in 1854. This infusion of capital helped to pay for the increased foreign recruitment (Gonzales, 1989; Hayes, n.d.; Hwang, 2013). The emergence of one particular commodity in the 1800s created intense demand for labor in addition to the plantations. Over centuries on the Chincha Islands, just off the coast of Peru, sea birds feasting on the anchoveta rich waters of the coldwater Humboldt Current had created literal mountains of nitrogen, potassium and phosphate rich guano up to 200 feet deep (Durfee, 2018). These deposits became some of the very first commodified chemical fertilizers to be used in the agricultural revolution happening during the middle of the 19th century (Giaimo, 2015). Upon arrival the Chinese workers would soon learn the truth behind the deception that brought them to the Americas as they chiseled away the mountain of guano and inhaled the dust kicked up when the bags of fertilizer dropped into the hulls of the cargo vessels. Mining the caustic bird droppings was not only laborious, but also dangerously unhealthy. Workers were forced to mine for up to 20 hours per day for seven days per week in order to meet their daily quotas. About 2/3 of their income was deducted to pay for meager room and board, and frequent punishment by lashing was meted out for those who refused to work (Mann, 2011). Trapped on the islands, many of the workers resorted to suicide. Observers at the time were scandalized by conditions on the island that were deemed little better than slavery and even worse than slavery according to many. It was variously described as “Hell on Earth” and “a kind of human abattoir, or slaughter-house of men” (Loustaunau et al., 2021, p. 14). The reality is that most who went there, died there. However, as long as new workers could be replenished through the coolie trade to China, work and profits could continue. As individuals, they were expendable. Yet as a whole group they were clearly valuable as a whole to the Peruvian state, whose economy thrived off of the guano

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trade. In fact, the end of the coolie trade in 1874 and the cheap exploitable labor it supplied began a slow process of economic decline, only later accelerated by the decline of the guano industry (Gonzales, 1989). This remains today one of the worst possible examples of the exploitation of labor migrants. The precarities felt by most migrant workers today pale in comparison to those of the Chinese indentured servants of the 19th century. But that does not mean that they are without vulnerability or that they do not suffer curbs on their freedoms. The reality is that migration in general and temporary migration in particular exists along a continuum of exploitation ranging from mostly benign impacts to rather extreme ones. To what extent workers experience unfreedoms of temporary migration are variable (Strauss & McGrath, 2017). All of this serves as a reminder of the multitude of factors that create mobile workforces, from state action, to economic dislocation, to industrial innovation, and demands for accessible labor. It also serves to illustrate who benefits from others’ mobility and the potential human consequences. Not surprisingly, the host society tends to reap economic benefits of having imported workers, while the benefits that accrue to those workers may or may not outweigh the costs of their time, money, or even lives when they go elsewhere to work.

Migrant Workers in Tourism While the causes of labor shortages are variable and place contingent, there are some commonplace features regarding labor migration and its causes that tend to be seen repeatedly. In some cases, local workers have internalized the notion that certain jobs are beneath them, perhaps in part due to discourses surrounding low status work that prevents it from even entering their minds as a potential option. Declining birthrates may also prevent an abundance of working age citizens leading to a tighter labor market, forcing businesses to pay higher wages to secure enough workers. Even if workers are present in numbers, skills mismatches may make it difficult for businesses to find the right people that they need in the local labor market. In some cases, businesses may find these situations untenable and thus choose to relocate their operations, what may be described as a “spatial fix” (Harvey, 1982). In some cases, such a fix may involve simply moving production to new friendly environs with cheap, abundant, and pliable (non-unionized) labor. This was seen in the United States with the shift of automobile manufacturing from the northern “rust belt” cities to the “right-to-work” states in the south. In other cases, operations may be (in)famously outsourced altogether with major portions of production being performed overseas by contracted businesses in lower wage countries. This was seen in the great shift of the textile industry from the southern United States to Asia over the past several decades. However, not every industry or

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operation is mobile; some are wholly rooted in place. Such is the generally case with tourism (the cruise sector excepted of course). Because the locations of tourism are fixed in place, problems arising from labor shortages or skills mismatches cannot be solved with industrial relocation. In the case of tourism, while outsourcing production may not be an option, “insourcing” may be. This requires adapting the notion of spatial fixes to acknowledge the larger range of spatial practices involved in our economies. Much as other industries have historically sought to physically bring workers to the point of production in order to solve labor issues, so has tourism. In this way, tourism is not unique. However, in many places tourism also involves the special cases of seasonality that it shares with only select industries. This makes tourism among the unenviable few sectors that are faced with the consistent threat of labor shortages during times of peak demand: Wherever tourist traffic flows create a demand for labour which the local economy cannot meet, or require skills and competences which cannot be found in a rural or maritime economy, migrants will be drawn in to fill the gap. If not, the lack of appropriate labour will constrain growth. Seasonal migration will therefore make its mark on regional, national or international labour markets, helping to sustain depressed economies in other areas and providing opportunities for the young, while challenging the established norms and values of existing cultures. (Walton, 2012, p. 66)

In this regard, migrant workers in tourism have often been used in a temporary capacity to fill gaps in the local labor market (Joppe, 2012). This has been the case in numerous international contexts (D. Lee et al., 2015; McDowell et al., 2007, 2009; Zopiatis et al., 2014) as well as within the United States (Griffith, 2006; Terry, 2016, 2018), whether they be citizen workers migrating internally, internationals with legal permission to work, or otherwise. In the United States, migration for seasonal work evolved along with the development of tourism in many areas. In the era prior to and after the Civil War, some of the first Appalachian Mountain resorts in the South deliberately avoided hiring local mountain people to interact with the wealthy clientele who had come to view them with condescension. Instead, innkeepers imported both hospitality and constructions workers, sometimes utilizing their own black slaves or those of their guests (C. B. Martin, 2007). This both heightened class tensions between local workers, resorts, and imported workers and helped to establish the framework for continued seasonal tourism labor migration throughout the region. Similar patterns can be seen throughout the country with different groups filling the role of migrant workers depending on the specific cases in each location. One example is the Catskills Mountains of New York state, the famous resort area that rose to prominence in the middle part of the 20th century earning the colloquial name “The Borscht Belt” due to the mostly Jewish vacationers who had found refuge here when anti-Semitism kept them out of most other locations. With as many as 500 inns and resorts and welcoming as many as 150,000 tourists in the summers during

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the 1950s and 60s there were simply not enough available local workers in the rural area to manage the peak demands. As a result, the large resorts relied heavily on young, mostly Jewish workers to spend their summers filling out the various roles of serving guests. The largely Jewish profile of workers reflected the ethnic makeup of the vacationers who often provided social connections to obtain the jobs and could also easily be understood by workers of the same background. Despite this, a clear segmentation existed with the most menial jobs at resorts being allocated to mostly non-white men hired separately through employment agencies. They handled dishwashing, groundskeeping, and general maintenance, were poorly paid, and were altogether restricted from accessing the amenities that the other workers were permitted to enjoy (Brown, 2004; Miller, 2014). Eventually the Catskills declined as a resort area and by the end of the 20th century, most summer resorts had closed, and with it the need for seasonal labor. However, across the United States other areas were continuing to emerge or evolve as resort areas and so followed the needs to staff their businesses. The reliance on migrant workers, while a common feature in tourism around the world, is not without critique. From an industrial perspective, some have argued that the reliance on migrant workers comes at a cost to the development of human capital in the tourism sector: It is arguable that the widespread recruitment and use of migrant labour in the tourism industry of developed countries has acted to the detriment of real change within the sector’s workplace. The argument that the tourism sector cannot recruit to unfilled vacancies and, therefore, turns to external labour sources is predicated upon the assumption that the labour economics of the industry remain appropriate and need not change. There are exceptions, as evidenced in good practice examples across the sector, but much of the industry operates on the basis of a labour economics model that depends upon high turnover, low pay, poor conditions and minimal investment in training. Accessing low cost but untrained migrant labour is likely to act as a dead hand with respect to change within the workplace economics of the sector. As a consequence, many tourism businesses do not perceive the need to change. They are not required to consider strategies designed to enhance labour productivity, notably through real investment in training and development in order to reduce the numbers they need to employ at higher rates of pay because low cost employees remain readily available. (Baum 2008 p. 1394)

Alongside this argument that utilizing low cost migrant labor allows businesses to avoid the burden of training and skills development is the related assertion that importing workers also serves to keep pay in the sector deflated. These are undoubtedly applicable concerns in the wider context of the tourism labor market. Labor markets are at least in part products of place and therefore highly variable based on local conditions. I merely suggest that in many places, especially those with a distinctly seasonal profile combined with a limited local labor market, the story is much more complicated. The question remains as to how businesses might be expected to invest in training and skills development when they will likely only

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employ a typical worker for a season or two, and even raising wages to attract workers is not enough to stay adequately staffed. It is no surprise then that rather than attempting to develop a limited pool of workers in the local labor market, employers have sought out people who already possess these skills from other locations. The question then becomes one of where these skills are to be found. Again, the answer depends on the local context. In the example of the UK prior to their exit from the European Union, rural tourism businesses had found workers from other parts of European Union or from British Commonwealth countries due to the ability of those workers to legally access UK labor market (Baum, 2012b). In the United States, while there has been an historic internal migration of seasonal workers in tourism in some places as previously noted, increasingly businesses have looked abroad. With fewer young Americans taking what had been jobs that were seemingly tailored for their age group, it is perhaps not a surprise that the J-1 Summer Work and Travel program would be so attractive to employers in seasonal resort areas. If one cannot find teenagers and American university students in the numbers they once did, it would seem that foreign university students would make a natural substitute. Unlike the example of the EU, where labor mobility amongst constituent countries is relatively free of restriction, in the United States foreign workers can only access work legally with explicit permission of the state. This happens through a complex system of government agencies and visa programs that serve a myriad of purposes, but only a select few can be described as specifically created and managed with the purpose of promulgating guest work. Understanding the role of the state in mobilizing workers for the needs of capital accumulation in tourism is essential to any project or attempt aimed at evaluating how tourism resort areas have become so reliant on foreign labor.

3 Why, we only Live to Serve!: A Brief History of Guestworker Programs Places exist in a delicate balance between the presence of work that needs to be accomplished and the amount of people that are available to do it. At times the amount of work that can be added or might be added in a particular place is tempered by the limitations of the size of the local population. The growth in the population may lead to greater opportunities to develop industries or projects that demand more workers. Or in some cases, new innovations or discoveries may lead to new industries or projects without a pre-existing growth in the available labor supply. The latter case presents a basic geographic problem that has been a feature in the world for as long as there has been work to be done: what happens when the demand for work in a place is not met by local supply, and furthermore, what happens when such demand is not constant? Historical evidence suggests that a robust seasonal labor migration existed in the Ancient Roman Republic/Empire between the rural interior of the Italian Peninsula and major cities like Rome. It seems that despite the presence of a large body of urban dwellers, peasants from the countryside were often needed to satisfy the labor demand for building projects, port work, and other industries that tended to peak in the summer (Erdkamp, 2016). In the Americas, the Incas maintained a practice of rotational labor tribute called mita in which men would take their turn annually working on public agriculture and infrastructure projects. This formed part of the social contract of the empire, and when they were taking their own turn away on projects or fulfilling military duty could rely on the state to feed their families and take care of their own fields with other mita workers. Mita labor allowed the Incas to transform their environment with temple complexes, terracing for agriculture, and one of the most comprehensive road networks of the pre-industrial world. The repartimiento system, based on mita, was later adopted by the Spanish as a form of compulsory labor demanded of indigenous people. In this system, a portion of indigenous communities’ workers would be sent to perform work for less than a year to complete specific tasks, work in agriculture, or mine valuable materials like silver (Covey, 2017). In effect, it was scarcely better than slavery and declined along with the reduction of the indigenous population due to disease. These examples suggest that every society that has been faced with this this dilemma has developed a variety of methods for dealing with geography/labor mismatches. As modern examples similarly illustrate, the mobility of labor is a feature of the historical and ongoing geography of labor. This chapter showcases a few examples of how state-sponsored guestworker programs have been utilized over the past half century or so in various places around the world, especially as they relate to ongoing efforts to alleviate shortages in tourism and hospitality industries. I then turn to the evolution of guestworker programs in the United States as they have morphed https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-003

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over the past couple centuries from piecemeal arrangements between private actors to institutionalized systems that co-evolved with the development of the capitalist political economy of the country. As these cases show, states play a central role in facilitating the accumulation of capital by assisting in solving or at least mitigating this basic geographic mismatch between work and labor.

Europe Western Europe provides what may be the most famous example of a guestworker program. The economic recovery and subsequent boom following the Second World War in many countries led to acute labor shortages. Countries like the UK, France, and the Netherlands could allow migration from their current or former colonies. But others who had no such ties (e.g. Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden) were left to search for other options. In 1961, West Germany introduced its Gastarbeiter program that became the most developed mass guestworker program of all. Lasting until 1973, the West German state facilitated the arrival of over two million foreign workers, most of whom came from the Mediterranean periphery (especial Turkey) to work lower skilled manufacturing jobs. While German officials may have intended for these workers to stay temporarily, it failed to restrict unification of families or to create legal barriers to permanent immigration. The result was that many ended up staying permanently, leading to decades of social and political debate over the nature of European citizenship, nationality, and multiculturalism (Castles, 2000; Jacoby, 2004). While the Gastarbeiter program was famous in its failure to prevent permanent migration, it did lead to a new yet much less known approach to guestworker recruitment in the 1990s. With German reunification came a renewed need for labor, especially to satisfy the construction boom but also to work in seasonal hospitality. To meet this demand in a way that concurrently satisfied the German political position of no immigration, a system of project-tied worker recruitment was initiated that allowed employers to bring in foreign labor insofar as projects were temporary in nature, workers lacked access to the German social welfare system, and that they must rotate back to their home country for an equal period of time before they return to Germany again for work (Ellermann, 2015).

Canada Like Germany, Canada also experienced an evolution of its guestworker programs that eventually saw a shift toward a more employer-driven form of recruitment and regulation. Like the United States, the agricultural sector provided the first experiments with imported labor, later expanding to other sectors, including light manufacturing, food processing, and, hospitality. In 1966, Canada initiated the Seasonal Agricultural

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Workers Program (SAWP), that allowed foreign workers into the country from between six weeks and eight months. It remains in effect. Initially, these workers largely came from other places connected within the larger British Commonwealth, particularly the Caribbean. Later, the patterns of recruitment steadily converged with those of the United States as the Canadian government shifted policy to all Mexican workers as well. This shift likely aligned with racialized notions of both working groups (Mexicans as hard working and docile, Caribbean natives as lazy and combative) (Sawchuk & Kempf, 2008). The Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as it is called today was given its basic structure with the establishment of Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program in 1973. This signaled a shift away from programs targeting specific sectors like agriculture and domestic care (although these remained under the SAWP and the Live-in Caregiver Program) towards a general program aimed at mitigating labor shortages in an array of occupations (Fudge & MacPhail, 2009). Still, the TFWP focused primarily on highly skilled workers until 2002, when pressure from employers in the construction and oil industries prompted the government to introduce the Low-Skilled Pilot Project. Since that time, the share of temporary workers coming on the Low-skilled stream has outstripped highly-skilled workers (Fudge & MacPhail, 2009; Nakache, 2013). Accommodation and food services industries have seen the largest increases in use of low-skilled Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW), to the extent that employers in these industries are possibly becoming dependent upon a steady stream of foreigners to address continual labor shortages, leading them to maintain political pressure to ensure access to guestworkers (Foster, 2012). In Canada today the hotel industry alone employs over 300,000 people across the country (Willie et al 2017), with projections on tourism and hospitality jobs to include something in the order of 240,000 positions that may remain unfilled through 2035 (Murray and Elliott et al 2017). While projections over such an extended time horizon can certainly be questioned with unknown issues that may arise in the interim (see the recent COVID-19 recession), it is very reasonable to assume that finding the sort of workers that they hope to have in order to clean rooms and serve patrons will be a considerable challenge to the industry, and why the TFWP will likely play a significant role in tourism and hospitality employment going forward.

Asian Developmental States Much as worker shortages developed in the growing economies of the West, so did they in the various rapidly growing East Asian “Developmental States” most notably represented by Japan and the “Four Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). While originally resistant to the admission of foreign workers, especially

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Japan which still heavily restricts non-Japanese immigration, most countries followed Singapore’s lead in switching from policies aimed at nationalizing the workforce to ones based at least in part on temporary migration. In 1982, Singapore introduced a Foreign Worker Levy to be paid on a per-employee basis by companies who contracted workers from abroad. Additionally, companies must pay for worker permits for lowerwage employees and are subject to worker dependency ceilings that prevent them from hiring too many cheaper foreign workers (Chia, 2011). Bureaucrats are able to maintain control of foreign worker numbers with this free-market approach by adjusting the size of the levy based on job sector or worker origins. Most foreign workers are recruited in other South or Southeast Asian countries. This model is also notable in the insulation of policymakers from the lobbying efforts of businesses in favor of alignment with specific policies set by the state which may or may not reflect business interests (J. J. G. Lee, 2019).

The Gulf States Perhaps the most infamous contemporary guestworker regimes of all are those found in the oil states of the Persian Gulf. After the discovery of massive petroleum reserves and the subsequent development of the industry, demand for labor skyrocketed, very quickly outstripping the supply of the relatively sparsely inhabited countries of the region. As a result, the various countries turned to migrant labor, first in oil production and construction but also later in various service-based positions in hospitality as the countries embraced tourism as a diversification strategy (Mansfeld & Winckler, 2007). Today this region holds a special place in tourism labor regimes as many recruiters in the Philippines who hire for the cruise industry view working experience at a five-star hotel in the Gulf region as an essential prerequisite for consideration. The system known as kafala emerged as the primary means of importing workers from abroad which relied on the employer acting as a sponsor who assumes full legal responsibility for those they hire. Workers tend to be employed on contracts of two to three years during which they are completely reliant on their employer who wields inordinate control over their lives (DamirGeilsdorf & Pelican, 2019). Unsurprisingly, this has led to massive exploitation of many of the mostly South and Southeast Asian workers during the past 40 years. The influx of guestworkers has also created a distinctly bifurcated society due to the prevalence of “rentier relationships” between the ruling families of the region and citizens who effectively exchange their political participation for massive economic and social benefits, like low taxes, generous health care coverage, and comfortable well-paid employment in government jobs. With citizens occupying nice jobs in the public sector, they are effectively not available for work in lower-paid service sector positions. The result is a massive dual labor market split between well-paid nationals and low-paid foreign workers (Mansfeld & Winckler, 2007). This

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fact is highlighted by the fact that among six countries that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council, 60% of the total population are migrant workers. The statistic is even more eye-catching when considering that migrant workers represent over 70% of the working population, rising to over 95% in Dubai and Qatar (Damir-Geilsdorf & Pelican, 2019). In essence, there is no single place on Earth more reliant on guestworkers.

The United States Migration to the United States has often been categorized as occurring in three major waves. The first took place in the early part of the 19th century with people mostly arriving from northern European countries like Germany. Migration became very heavy during the “Hungry Forties” when the infamous potato blight ravaged not only Ireland, but the entire region that had come to rely on the lumper potato. As farmers suddenly found their crops wiped out and the population began to starve, the opportunity to migrate to the United States seemed like an attractive option and thus “famine ships” began to arrive in droves. Also, political upheaval on the continent, particularly the uprisings of 1848, served as push factors that sent many dissidents fleeing in search of asylum when their reform efforts failed. Many of these “Forty-Eighters” reshaped the ethnic character of newly westward expanding cities especially of the Midwest and came to play a significant role in the coming Civil War. It was the years of The Civil War, that saw the first major efforts on the part of the state to begin shaping migration. During and after the conflict, as the United States continued its rapid pace of industrial growth and westward expansion, it found itself welcoming immigrants at an unprecedented rate. The Homestead Act (1862) and the Act to Encourage Immigration (1864) were examples of Congressional Action taken at the time to spur more interest in coming to the United States. The latter allowed for contracts made overseas with foreign laborers to work in the United States to be enforceable in U.S. courts. It also set up a system in which workers could pay for their passage to the United States in exchange for up to a year’s worth of indentured servitude. This led to some abuse of the program and despite language written into the law to protect immigrants from fraud it came under sharp criticism and was repealed by 1868 (Silverman, 2015). However, both acts were indicative of the period in terms of setting the stage and foretelling the massive wave of immigrants coming to North America in the decades to follow. While the late 19th century was not a period associated with what we would now think of as state-sponsored guest work, it was certainly one in which contract work was a prominent feature of the labor markets of the era. In particular, the padrone system became a major form of facilitating the recruitment of workers from abroad in places like Italy and Greece and bringing them to work under a labor

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contract. The padrone (labor boss) took a cut of the wages in exchange for bringing them to the United States and held significant sway over recruits by controlling access to most of the local jobs. Immigrants in this system were often held in a form of bondage and what would feel today like human trafficking as they were forced to pay exorbitant fees to secure their work and then pay it off over time to the padrone. (Lariccia & Tucciarone, 2019; G. Peck, 1996). All of this was done as part of a “free labor” system and as such was officially sanctioned: Not only did padrones use contracts and the legal system to create coercive labor relations, but much of their power grew without any formal legal sanctions. Padrones controlled immigrant workers primarily by exploiting their geographic mobility and the family networks that sustained it. Paradoxically, they transformed workers’ freedom to move and to quit into building blocks of padrone power. (G. Peck, 1996, p. 849)

The idea that mobility would create more precarious lives for workers seems almost paradoxical considering that the ability to move about freely is a hallmark of wealth and that being tied to place is often associated with poverty and lack of opportunity. However, when geographic mobility is created due to push factors at home that compel workers to leave in order to flee unemployment, persecution, or any number of personal dangers, they become instantly subject to increased vulnerability. This, coupled with the simple fact that they may also be connected to families back home that rely on their remittances for support, creates an incentive to accept conditions that others with more options may consider unacceptable. Many of the migrants making their way to the United States in the late 19th century were just these sort of people and thus easily exploitable by the padrones. The influx of so many new migrants to the United States in this period also sparked a backlash and by the 1880s concerns over the ethnic character and number of immigrants had led to political opposition to allowing so many foreigners so openly with little restriction. Under the padrone system, for example, immigrants were often supplied to companies as strike breakers and a significant number of Chinese workers had been contracted through labor bosses to work in the west. By 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first major act to restrict immigration and would be reaffirmed several times over the next four decades. The padrone system also came under fire as a principal target of the Foran Act (1885) that banned the importation of workers under contract to work in the United States. Despite this legislation, padrones continued to creatively skirt the laws and continued to find legal means of acting as intermediaries between workers and corporations in the labor market, paradoxically increasing their power in many circumstances where enforcement of the Foran Act made the regulatory burden of utilizing immigrants workforces higher (G. Peck, 1996). Although certain barriers to the use of immigrant labor were the norm as the United States entered the 20th century, some examples existed to relax the rules for particular groups. Due to the extension of American colonial power to Southeast Asia following the Spanish American War, Filipino

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workers were granted special permission to work in the United States, at a time when other Asians were barred from entry. Most of these migrants were from agricultural regions of the Philippines, recruited to work in the agricultural fields of California and Hawaii, often under brutal conditions (Gonzalez, 1998). Later as the United States entered World War I, the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1917 which granted citizenship to Puerto Ricans for the first time since it was colonized after the Spanish American War in 1898. This allowed them legal access to the American labor market for the first time and set the stage for their entry into various low-status jobs. The act also created the first formal mechanisms to import temporary farm labor from Mexico. This war-time measure allowed farmers to directly contract workers in the tightening labor market. The act relaxed certain provisions to allow unskilled workers, such as a literacy test, that might otherwise prevent their entry into the country (Griffith, 2006). The program only lasted until 1921, but migration continued informally in the 1920s (Oliveira, 1989). A similar, more well known, and more infamous program would emerge in the wake of World War II that would loom large in the history of American guest work.

The Bracero Program Generally speaking, agriculture is a necessarily seasonal industry. This is certainly the case with farms growing in monocultures and specialized agriculture that focuses on one or a limited number of crops in a given year. These may be efficient in terms of economic maximization of land that works best for a particular crop, but it means that there will be only a limited number of times during the year when workers are needed in abundance. The cyclical nature of the growing cycle requires that the work to be done in the fields is more or less intensive at different times associated with field preparation, planting, weeding, and of course, harvesting. Growers in the United States have long had to contend with this conundrum. By the mid to late 19th century, fruit, vegetable, and cotton farms throughout the country had become dependent on seasonally hired laborers that developed regularized patterns of migration streams up and down both coasts and in the midwest. In fact, the seasonal workforce had come to dwarf the year-round labor force around that time. While this did enable farmers to maximize their labor costs, the reliance on seasonal pools of labor was far from assured. Regular patterns do exist for harvesting, but yearly variations in weather make precisely timing the harvest and need for workers a guessing game. Also, workers also might find that other farmers would pay more in their panic to ensure the crop is picked on time. Thus, an annual competition for workers pitted farmers against one another to find enough workers. This was not always an ideal situation for migrant workers due to the costs of travel and inability to know exactly when to arrive until just before needed. These inefficiencies often cut into their earning time, leading them to

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scramble to find the most abundant work and pay wherever possible. In order to curb the competition between farms in the scramble for workers, growers at this time attempted to control local labor markets through organized collusion that found them agreeing on wages; although little evidence exists that they were very successful. Apparently too many farmers would act to undercut the unenforceable wage agreements. Despite this, some regions such as the Jim-Crow era south did manage to maintain a low-wage workforce in perpetuity through an entire socioeconomic system that kept African Americans poor, undereducated, and without political power (Grove, 1996). Things began to change throughout the 1940s and 50s. New farming technologies were beginning to increase yields, but reduce the need for labor, especially in cotton production. This meant that more workers were needed for harvest, but fewer workers were needed the rest of the year. As a result, local workers who had formally been accessible to farmers began to leave since their prospects for steady work had disappeared, making farmers even more reliant on seasonal labor. At this time, African Americans increasingly began to leave the exploitive conditions found throughout the south, that had kept them in debt peonage. The years of the “Great Migration” the rural south saw its labor markets transformed as black Americans found better opportunities in the north and out west. During the 1950s the number of rural African Americans leaving the south was double that of whites (Grove, 1996). The short story is that in particular areas farmers found themselves with a crisis that expanded in the years after World War II. Early in the 20th century, farmers in the southwest of the United States could often draw on a surplus of Mexican laborers who could usually make up for shortages of local workers. labor shortages associated with World War I led to a great influx of Mexican workers. Until 1921, Mexico had been in the midst of Revolution that created massive socioeconomic dislocations. During the post-revolutionary decades to follow, the Cárdenas administration’s land reform actions broke up the large haciendas that had dominated Mexican agriculture in order to redistribute land to peasants into smaller landholding plots. The upheaval associated with this action, along with drought, and farmers’ lack of access to credit, created depressed agricultural production. Unemployment rose as a result and greatly contributed to cross-border migration (Mandeel, 2014). However, the economic cataclysm of the Great Depression, left many of these recently arrived Mexicans stranded without work, at times needing to be repatriated by the Mexican state (Creagan, 1965). In the United States, farmers found themselves with an abundance of workers, especially throughout the 1930s. That said, this didn’t stop them from consistently jockeying for even more workers to add to the already abundant surplus. Their fears of rising wages and fears of a lack of workers to pick a perishable crop (mostly due to an efficient system of supplying workers evenly to meet the various harvesting seasons) seems to have compelled their consistent calls for action (Scruggs, 1960). Despite this pressure, especially from Texas cotton growers who witnessed many

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migrant workers leave for better wages in Northern sugar beet fields, American officials did not bend on the issue. Things changed rapidly after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States found itself shifting to a full war economy. Fears of a severe labor shortage in many industries and on many farms in the United States ended up being the impetus that finally moved the state into action of behalf of growers. Between the literal armies of young men who left to join the fight against Germany and Japan, and those who moved to cities in order to work in better paying factory jobs, rural areas in the country found themselves with a potential lack of bodies to do the work in the fields. In 1942, farmers in the American southwest began to alert government officials of a looming crisis if they could not find enough people to pick the crops that would be ready for harvest by the end of the summer. Between mass unemployment in Mexico and the growing labor shortage in the United States, the conditions were ripe for both counties to seek options to alleviate these stressors. Accordingly, in July 1942, the U.S. government crafted a cooperative agreement with Mexico called the Mexican Farm Labor Program that subsequently came to be known colloquially as the “Bracero” program. The war provided an important justification for the program considering that the 1885 Foran Act barring foreign contract workers was still in effect. Thus, the first several years of the Bracero program became what Kim (2004) has described as the “legitimation” phase in which congressional and executive action done in the name of the wartime emergency served to establish the program’s validity in the face of prior policy. In many ways, the war served as an illustration of the sort of emergency not-gone-to-waste in which changes made to alleviate legitimate concerns came to become (semi)permanent once the crisis abated. Considering that just over 200,000 Mexican workers came to the United States during the war, and long after the war this number would explode to upwards of 3 million, it seems that public policy had shifted dramatically toward the interests of capital and that the state was serving those interests well. While the Bracero program was indeed created as a guestworker program to physically bring workers from Mexico to the United States, within a decade it had become less about bringing new Mexican laborers and more of a means of legally embracing undocumented workers already in the country. When the original statutes passed by congress were allowed to expire in 1947, executive action, based on the Immigration Act of 1917 and international agreements with Mexico, allowed for employers to directly contract workers supervised by INS (Oliveira, 1989). However, when farmers found recruiting workers to be an onerous and expensive process, INS stepped in to develop a quick process of converting Mexican farm workers who were in the country illegally, into officially sanctioned parolees who would then function as Braceros. By 1950, the number of workers brought into the program this way was five times that of those actually brought directly from Mexico. The sanctioning of undocumented Mexicans ended up characterizing this second “crisis” phase of the Bracero Program that ultimately created a feedback loop:

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Although such legalization of undocumented workers was intended to reduce the number of illegal workers in the United States, the policy of favoring employment of undocumented workers produced the opposite effect. It created an incentive for an even greater influx of illegal workers who wanted to become contract workers through the INS. (J. Kim, 2004, p. 23)

During this time, the warts associated with the program began to garner attention. In negotiating and signing agreements to begin the program and extend it, Mexico had been attempting to provide some level of protection for its citizens. Yet still Braceros were often subjected to poor living and working conditions. The program also began to receive scrutiny for its impacts on local wages and conditions of employment. As a result, in 1950, President Truman signed an executive order to establish a Commission on Migrant Labor to investigate the impacts of the Bracero Program. Its findings were damning. The commission found that even in emergencies, more efficient use of domestic labor markets should suffice and that the program had led to some displacement of domestic labor and an erosion of employment standards. The report also paid special attention to the particular vulnerabilities faced by migrant workers. Recommendations coming out of the report specifically called out the poor housing conditions and the “haphazard” way that migrants matched themselves with available work: In many instances, the labor contractor or crew leader recruits and directs the worker to employment. He may not only provide him work but transportation, housing, and other services; and he may not only furnish the employer workers but also supervise and pay them. In this provision of “middleman” services, there is chance for abuses to the worker to develop and the worker seldom has any channel through which complaints may be registered and adjusted. The contractor may misrepresent employment, overcharge for services, or underpay for work in order to increase his own pay which, in many instances, is the difference between what he receives and what he pays workers. (The Recommendations of the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor, by Maurice J. Tobin, Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor, and William L. Connolly, Director, Bureau of Labor Standards, April 1952, n.d.)

The echoes of the padrone system reverberate in this document. In a labor system that lacks efficiencies due to the dynamic and unpredictable timeframes and disparate locations when and where work is to be done, intermediaries who can make connections between employer and worker serve an obvious role. In essence, these middlemen serve to solve what is an inherently a problem of geography when the location of people and the location of work do not match well. But as in many other industries and places where the need to match spatially static yet temporally intermittent work to mobile workforces, unsavory people with nefarious motives always seem to find ways to take advantage. Despite the problems that had arisen since its inception, the Bracero program was renewed in 1951 with the passage of Public Law 78 that brought it into its “normalization” phase (J. Kim, 2004). It did not come without significant debate in U.S. Congress over the aforementioned problems and how to deal with them. A great

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number of provisions did end up being written into the law covering a host of details pertaining to workers and employers rights and responsibilities, the administrative responsibilities of both countries, an enumeration of costs and transportation, and a Standard Work Contract that could not be altered accept by an agreement of both the Mexican and American states. This contract addressed a great deal of the concerns that had prompted President Truman to commission the report such as lodging conditions and wage complaints. Regarding wages, in order to protect domestic workers from the introduced competition from abroad, the program included a provision that Braceros must be paid the “prevailing wage” determined by the secretary of labor that was roughly equivalent to the typical local wages attached to a particular type of work in a particular area. Also, employers would also be required to attempt to hire from the domestic labor market first before they would be allowed to turn to Braceros. The prevailing wage, while not necessarily directly determined by growers, was influenced by the previous low wages that growers had provided. As a result, wages that would generally be unacceptable to domestic workers in exchange for the grueling sort of labor found in the fields, would fail to attract workers. This necessitated growers to turn to the Bracero program, and in many areas led to their domination over entire areas and sectors of the labor market. The dominant presence of Braceros fundamentally altered the relationship between domestic workers and growers and gave farmers the ability to effectively eliminate wage competition as whatever wage paid to Braceros became the prevailing wage: domination was when braceros – a controlled, indentured labor force – not only predominated in the labor market (for an area or a crop), but in the process eliminated the possibility for domestic workers even to find work, to sell their labor power at all. Domination was (again as we will see) an inevitable result of the program as it was structured – it was written into the genetic code of pl 78 and the international agreements – that eliminated for a whole class of people the very possibility of selling their labor power, of submitting themselves to formal subjection. (Mitchell, 2012, p. 285)

In essence and in practice, the Bracero Program violated the spirit and intentions of PL 78, by providing a government sanctioned means of allowing growers to fix wages (Grove, 1996). The number of Braceros expanded rapidly in the 1950s after PL 78 came into effect. The quick growth was in large part due to the implementation of an immigration enforcement action to remove undocumented workers using military tactics. “Operation Wetback,” racist in name and in action, was the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. As illegal Mexican workers were rounded up and unceremoniously dumped back inside Mexico, often in places far from their homes, demand for Braceros grew in their absence. Operation Wetback lasted a relatively short time but served as a means of consolidating the Bracero program. Its success in removing and keeping out undocumented workers rested on the ability of INS to ensure that the Bracero program could deliver workers as needed lest growers return to employing illegals. The roughly 200,000 Mexican workers brought to the United States in 1953 had more than

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doubled to almost 450,000 in three years, and in its last decade the 3.5 million braceros came at a rate eight times higher than during the emergency years of World War II (J. Kim, 2004). While domestic workers were basically driven out of some areas, working conditions for the Braceros who now dominated many of the fields were often brutal. Poor living quarters, with questionable drinking water access, low-wages, and work in low-yield crops became indicative of the Bracero experience at the bottom of a segmented agricultural labor force. This was also the era of the short-handed hoe, also known as el cortito (the short one) or el brazo del diablo (the devil’s arm). It was a tool that migrant workers were forced to use in many California fields growing crops like sugar beets and cabbage. Growers insisted on its use due to their distrust of workers’ ability to weed accurately with a long handle and possibly as a means of labor control (workers standing up weren’t being productive). The short length of the hoe required workers to bend over for hours on end in order to utilize it properly and consequently caused innumerable back, shoulder, and arm injuries (Mize, 2006). El cortito became a symbol of the oppressive working conditions found in agricultural fields and eventually was banned in California in 1975, due in no small part to the efforts of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America who had waged a public campaign against its use (Rivard, n.d.). Many of these abuses of the program were revealed in a publication by labor organizer Ernest Galarza called “Strangers in our Fields” (1956). Galarza had spent months interviewing Braceros and laid out a major indictment of the program by showing that lack of enforcement of provisions meant to protect workers had led to widespread abuse that had become the norm rather than exception. His work received national attention, much to the embarrassment of the various government agencies supposedly involved in oversight and had a role in leading to some immediate changes. Yet the program lasted another eight years after the publication of “Strangers in our Fields.” The reasons for its ultimate demise in 1964 are complex. By the early 1960s, increasing mechanization of fields continued to displace workers in many crops, and as a result demand for agricultural labor was beginning to decline overall. Also, it was clear that the Bracero program was mostly benefitting a specific group of growers of particular crops in a select group of states in the southwest and midwest rather than provide assistance across the country. The 1960s also ushered in a more liberal administration under John F. Kennedy that sought to strengthen guarantees that domestic workers would not be adversely affected by Mexican contract workers (J. Kim, 2004). The issue of harm to domestic workers seems to have been the most galvanizing force as Congress and the Department of Labor initiated public hearings on the fate of the program. Arguments were made on both sides, but those that sought the end to the program gained the most traction, such as those suggesting that the Bracero program was a subsidy that served as a crutch that prevented agriculturists from solving their own labor problems; the very ones that created demand for contracted Mexicans to begin with (Mitchell, 2012). Ultimately,

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after allowing for a one year extension, Congress allowed PL 78 and the Mexican Farm Labor Program expire at the end of 1964. Around 4.6 million Mexicans had come to the United States over the 22 years the program was in effect. The Mexican Farm Labor Agreement remains controversial as it was in its own time. Several direct investigations into the impacts of the program both from labor and government entities at the time found that indeed the presence of Braceros had profound adverse impacts on the domestic labor market as wages were fixed to push out American workers, forcing a turn to Braceros at the growers’ preferred rates. Many at the time had hoped that when guestworkers were no longer available, workers and higher wages would return. However, as was noted previously, a major reason the program eventually was allowed to expire was that machines had begun to replace workers in the fields. A recent analysis of wages and employment of American workers before and after the demise of the program, showed no significant changes. It appears that rather than hiring more local workers for better wages, farmers began to invest capital in new technologies that would reduce the need for labor (Clemens et al., 2018). In other words, they ramped up the process of mechanization of their fields. In at least one report from the time, California farmers began to pay up to 40% more in 1965, but still could not attract enough local workers, leading to unpicked, rotting fruits and vegetables and a reduction in acreages in some crops like tomatoes (Creagan, 1965). For Mexico and the Braceros themselves, the program came with mixed results. The warts of the program associated with labor exploitation were clear. Despite this, Mexico undoubtedly benefitted from a reduction in unemployment and an influx of foreign currency in the form of U.S. dollars. Ironically, only tourism brought in more than the roughly 28 million dollars Braceros sent home in 1962. Remittances provided valuable income to families that relied on the support of their member who had gone abroad, and local places enjoyed the influx of spending money. Returning workers also brought with them new skills and agricultural knowledge (Creagan, 1965). It may seem strange that an investigation in to guestworkers in tourism would spend so much time in discussing a program that involved agriculture. However, both agriculture and tourism share some important characteristics that showcase the importance of the Bracero Program as the first true attempt to create a state-directed and sponsored guestworker program in the United States. Both farming and tourism typically share the shifting demand problem of peak seasonality. Crops literally “come into season,” much like many destinations have a particular tourist season. During the rest of the year, only the labor needed is that to maintain the much lower demands associated with ongoing upkeep, maintenance or in the case of tourism, the drop off of tourism services. Both tend to also be isolated. Production in agriculture usually takes place in rural areas with low population densities. Tourism is much more diverse in location, but a significant proportion of the industry is likewise located far from major urban cores and their large labor markets. Finally, the lion’s

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share of work in both industries is performed by what is typically thought of as “unskilled” labor. Furthermore, many of the policies such as the prevailing wage and the requirement to prove attempts to hire domestic workers, while not necessarily effective during the era of the Mexican Labor Program are still significant features of the H visa programs that survive to this day. Overall, the program’s lessons remain important for examining the role of the state and bureaucracies in facilitating the availability of a cheap, compliant labor force for the needs of capital, as well as the role of guestworkers in degrading the position of local workforces (Calavita, 2010). It is important to underscore that the Bracero Program did not simply perpetuate the existing use of undocumented workers. Farmers could hire so-called “wetbacks” on the cheap, but they exhibited a high turnover rate and faced the perpetual threat of deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service agents. By contrast, the Mexican guest-worker program institutionalized commercial grower access to the productive, reliable supplementary labor force required by commercial growers, and allowed for its corporate management. (Grove, 1996, p. 317)

The Bracero Program, thus provided a means of rationalizing the agricultural labor market by removing uncertainties and inefficiencies associated with what might be considered a more free-market approach. The state in this case helped set the stage for capital accumulation by making markets more “legible” to growers (Scott, 1998). The predictability and flexibility associated with having the easy ability to contract workers allowed farmers to treat labor not as a special and dynamic cyclical problem, but with the ordered planning associated with all other inputs and processes of production. In short, it served as a form of state-sponsored labor market insurance (Grove, 1996).

Birth of the H Visa Even as the Bracero Program was just entering its mature phase in the early 1950s, another means of bringing in guestworkers was about to be born, the H visa. Interestingly, they were both formed in the crucible of World War II. However, while the Bracero program arose out of domestic pre-war concerns of farmers about the ongoing uncertainty of finding enough seasonal labor, the seed of the H visa was planted to help assuage geopolitical concerns. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the terrible socio-economic situation of the British island territories of the Caribbean had proven fertile ground for the development of radical left-wing and anticolonial politics. Into this maelstrom, arrived the United States, empowered by the newly-signed Destroyers-Bases Agreement (1940) with the U.K. This agreement allowed the U.S. to build military bases throughout the region in order to provide protection over the Panama Canal, and various strategically important raw materials mined in the region such as oil and bauxite. However, the construction program

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had a second purpose, namely to serve as a means of providing jobs to struggling islanders in order to dampen their enthusiasm for agitation that had the potential to boil over into a true security threat. These efforts were not completely successful in part because the labor boom was temporary until bases were completed. Also, the influx of American capital created local price inflation and further expectations of work to be done. Thus toward the end of the war in 1944, the U.S. under the War Food Administration created the British West Indies Temporary Alien Labor Program and signed agreements with several Caribbean territories to import workers into the United States in order to work on farms to meet the perceived labor shortage (Baptiste, 2003). Approximately 50,000 workers came from the Jamaica alone, along with 10,000 from Bahamas and Barbados and a small number also arriving from British Honduras. The vast majority of these workers ended up on farms east of the Mississippi river (Rasmussen, 1951). During these early years, workers experienced some difficulties similar to Mexican Braceros, despite stipulated safeguards as to how workers were to be treated, such as minimum wages paid by the government when no work could be found for them, and adequate housing. In some instances, workers faced a delay or non-payment of these unemployment wages, and found housing conditions to be poor. Also, Caribbean workers had to face the added burden of working in Jim Crow south and elsewhere, experiencing curbs on their personal freedoms and the sort of discrimination they were not used to in the mostly black island nations where they originated (Baptiste, 2003). In 1945 following Germany’s surrender, the War Food Administration was terminated and responsibility for the program was transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Shortly after in 1947, much as the Bracero program entered an interim phase when the emergency farm labor program ended, the importation of workers from the Caribbean continued by administrative action under the Immigration Act of 1917. This was the status until 1952 when the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 created the H visa. The H-1 visa would be used to admit non-immigrants “to perform temporary services of an exceptional nature requiring such merit and ability.” Meanwhile, the H-2 became the visa used to admit non-immigrant workers to perform temporary labor or services as long as unemployed Americans doing such work could not be found. At this point, the Bracero program and the H-2 program began to diverge. For one, the H-2 was now a permanent feature written into U.S. immigration law, whereas the Mexican Farm Labor program was based on statutes and agreements with Mexico that needed to be reaffirmed every two years. The H-2 visa was also not originally written for agriculture or any other specific need, although clearly it would be used heavily to recruit farm labor. And indeed the H-2 program continued as the primary way that East coast growers would utilize foreign guestworkers. Much like the earlier era of British West Indies program, it was not used nearly to the extent of the Bracero program. However once the Bracero program ended at the end of 1964, use of the H-2 visa began to expand a bit as the only remaining option

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for legally importing workers (Calavita, 2010). One major result was that the primary legally admitted group of temporary farm workers shifted from Mexicans to Caribbean nationals. For the East coast farms specifically, however, the shift was one away from mostly African American labor. The ability to now hire foreign nationals legally in this part of the country for the first time allowed Eastern growers to employ the time-tested methods seen in the west of playing different national groups off of one another in order to keep any single one from gaining significant bargaining power (Hahamovitch, 1997). The shift to Caribbean workers is not to suggest that Mexican labor was not still incredibly important in the West, just that these workers were no longer legal migrants (Oliveira, 1989). While many more growers had intended to shift to the H-2 with the demise of the Bracero program, regulations were added in 1964 to protect American farmworkers by mandating guestworkers be paid similar wages and that Americans be given the same benefits like housing that were granted to the H-2 workers (P. Martin, 2008). To most growers, it did not make sense to make use of the program because the workers were available at lower cost if undocumented. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had dramatically altered the landscape of immigration to the United States by ending the national-origins quota system that had been in place since the 1920s in an effort to favor migrants from Northwestern Europe. After 1965, priorities shifted away from quotas based on nationality to family reunification and favoring employment skills. Each country would be limited to a maximum of 20,000 migrants (120,000 total from the Western Hemisphere). It was at this point that the origins of immigrants to the United States shifted heavily away from Europe to Asia and the Americas. Despite the official cap now set on legal immigration from Mexico, plenty of Mexican workers still came to pick the crops, and growers were more than happy to employ them as the migratory patterns associated with southwestern agriculture through the Bracero period didn’t simply vanish upon the program’s demise. Moreover, the period actually set the stage for the ramp up of undocumented immigration to the United States that was to follow: By the late 1950s a massive circular flow of Mexican migrants had become deeply embedded in employer practices and migrant expectations and had come to be sustained by well-developed and widely accessible migrant networks. As a result, when avenues for legal entry were suddenly curtailed after 1965, the migratory flows did not disappear but simply continued without authorization or documents . . . the end of the Bracero Program corresponded exactly in time with the rise of illegal migration. From a figure of around 40,000 in 1965, the number of apprehensions per thousand agents rose to peak at around 460,000 in 1977. It then fluctuated between 330,000 and 460,000 from 1978 to 1986 whereupon it fell into the range of 240,000–320,000 per year after passage of IRCA . . . . In sum, illegal migration rose after 1965 not because there was a sudden surge in Mexican migration, but because the temporary labor program had been terminated and the number of permanent resident visas had been capped, leaving no legal way to accommodate the long established flows. With permanent resident visas capped, moreover, the inflow of legal immigrants could not rise and remained below 50,000 through the early 1970s and thereafter fluctuated between 50,000 and 100,000 per year. (Massey & Pren, 2012, p. 3)

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It is arguable that the precipitous rise of undocumented workers associated with coincidental passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the end of the Bracero program, and the failure to incorporate existing Mexican labor migrants into the H-2 program directly led to the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986. Immigrants from Mexico grew five-fold from 1970–1988, over two-thirds of whom were undocumented. It is not surprising that these workers became the subject of intense political debate, especially during economic downturns in 1974 and the early 1980s (Legarreta, 2008). Thus concerns of what to do about a group of people that were clearly productive members toiling within the American economy, but who were officially present illegally, created a sustained impetus to find a solution that would please both the business community as well as illegal-immigration hawks. After years of negotiation and fits and starts, Congress finally passed IRCA. This act of legislation presented a major overhaul of the immigration system. Its full impacts are beyond the scope of this work, however, one of the most immediately felt provisions was a general amnesty of 1.6 million unauthorized immigrants who had been working in the country for five years and seasonal workers who had been working the previous year. These people were given the opportunity to apply for permanent legal status and eventual citizenship. Two other major provisions included tougher enforcement along the southern border and harsher penalties for businesses who hired illegal workers. The idea was to wipe the slate clean and start afresh in a system that would be able to prevent future illegal immigration. In hindsight of course, the couple of decades that followed revealed that this was wishful thinking as undocumented Mexican migration continued apace through the 1990s and 2000s. The reasons for this flood of people seeking work are complex, but it is arguable that the passage of North American Free Trade Agreement, which left many Mexican farmers unable to compete with subsidized American agriculture due to lower trade barriers, played a large role. Furthermore, as Fernández-Kelly & Massey (2007, p. 115) argue, “maintaining a quota of twenty thousand visas per year for a nation to which the United States is so closely bound by history, geography, and free trade is unrealistically low.” In other words, one should expect undocumented immigration. IRCA is particularly important in telling the story of guestworkers in U.S. tourism and hospitality, however, because one of its lesser-known provisions was to split the H-2 visa into two distinct categories. The H-2A became the visa used for securing agricultural workers, while the H-2B was set up for all other non-agricultural work. This included a myriad of seasonal positions associated with forestry, landscaping, and fish processing, as well as the sort of work found in hotels and resorts such as bartending, culinary, and housekeeping. IRCA also allowed Mexican workers to utilize the H-2 programs for the first time as well. As a result, Mexican workers quickly began to supplant Caribbean workers on both visas. This was true for the H-2A as a whole, and for certain H-2B positions like landscaping, but for hospitality and tourism work Caribbean nationals still maintained their niche. Jamaicans in particular

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are still the most prevalent H-2B workers cooking in kitchens and cleaning hotel rooms to this day. Aside from the type of work that differentiates the two programs, the H-2B came with fewer protections for workers. Things like free travel to the worksite, free housing, and a guarantee that they would receive three quarters of the promised wages were all stripped from the H-2B, but remained for agricultural workers (Hahamovitch, 2011). So from its beginning, the H-2B came with more precarity for workers, a topic to which we will turn to later in chapter seven. To this day, the H-2B is really the only deliberately created work visa that allows unskilled non-agricultural seasonal labor entry into the United States. There is another, however, that while not created specifically to alleviate labor shortages in the United States has come to be used for exactly that purpose. And without it, the growth and maintenance of many tourism dependent areas in the United States would likely be in doubt.

Building Bridges: From Fulbright to J-1 Looking back, the 1960s proved to be a seminally important decade in the history of guestworkers in the United States. As the Bracero program wound to a close and the H-2 visa was about to become the only vehicle for legally importing foreign unskilled workers, another visa program was about to be born. The roots of this new visa lie in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the coming Cold War. In 1946, U.S. soldiers were returning home in glory, ready to spark an economic boom (as well as a baby boom). But left behind on countless beaches, fields, and supply depots in dozens of countries where the United States had been engaged in waging the greatest war in human history lie millions of pieces of materiel rusting away. These now-surplus war supplies represented an enormous capital outlay on the part of the U.S. taxpayer, but the cost of shipping them back home with no real purpose anymore created a dilemma. Unfortunately, much of the equipment was deemed unsalable, due to the lack of dollars available to purchase the items or by the lack of desire on the part of U.S. officials to accept sales on credit. Instead, various ideas were floated that involved the transfer of the surplus goods to the countries where they lay in exchange for some sort of benefit like property rights and various business concessions for American enterprises. It was at this moment that Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas proposed using the sale of the otherwise unsaleable war surplus to establish an exchange of students across various fields in a general effort at promoting good will. Senator Fulbright had developed a deep interest in international education during his time living in England and traveling through Europe as a Rhodes Scholar, and felt the national government had a larger role to play in its development (Jeffrey, 1987). Due to his efforts to personally shepherd the bill through both houses of Congress and curry favor from the executive branch, the bill passed unanimously. It has since become the foundation of the

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prestigious Fulbright Scholarship that has sent thousands of students and scholars between colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. Early on these exchanges were mostly clustered in those countries that accepted the deal for the equipment. Because the location of that equipment was predominantly distributed in Europe and some places in the Pacific theatre, those countries became the earliest participants in the program. While it would take some time for Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East to join in as well. Regardless, Fulbright and the program’s supporters clearly felt they had scored a victory in turning otherwise useless military “junk” into a real effort to promote peace and understanding in the world (Lebovic, 2013). The Fulbright Act was subsequently followed up with the Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act, to provide further funding to bring foreign students to the United States, including from countries that had few surplus military equipment purchases. It also provided the framework for cultural exchange programming. The first exchanges got underway in 1948 when 47 Americans went abroad and 36 foreign nationals (from Burma, China, and the Philippines) arrived in the United States. By 1952 participant numbers had grown to 1,253 and 2,210 respectively with the bilateral exchanges expanded to more than two dozen countries (The Early Years | Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, n.d.). When the Fulbright Act passed through Congress and was signed by President Truman in 1946, the newly authorized cultural exchanges came right at the dawn of the Cold War. As a result, the ideological struggle with communism shaped the emergence of inter-cultural exchanges as they came to be seen as an important instrument of foreign policy. In Fulbright’s own words: When people have seen a foreign nation themselves, they have something which resists prejudice and misrepresentation . . . An exchange foreign journalism student wrote that ‘Seeing the American way of life would convince even the staunchest Communist that there must be something to individual liberty and free enterprise after all. (Fulbright, 1961, p. 24)

In essence, cultural and academic exchanges were to be used as a means not only of promoting international peace and cooperation but also in recruiting potential allies in the effort to contain the spread of communism (Samuilova, 2014). During the 1950s, the Eisenhower Administration sought to enlarge the cultural exchange programming. Unfortunately, this expansion and the perception from partners abroad that the exchanges had become largely a vehicle for pro-American propaganda was sapping their support. Furthermore, despite some funding accruing to the programs from sales of agricultural surpluses, funding from surplus military equipment was beginning to run dry. Responding to this funding issue and in the interest of making the exchanges more apolitical, the Kennedy administration put its weight behind the passage of the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, better known as the FulbrightHays Act. This legislation reaffirmed the importance of international educational exchanges. The preamble to the act lays out its altruistic purpose in plain language:

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The purpose of this chapter is to enable the Government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange; to strengthen the ties which unite us with other nations by demonstrating the educational and cultural interests, developments, and achievements of the people of the United States and other nations, and the contributions being made toward a peaceful and more fruitful life for people throughout the world; to promote international cooperation for educational and cultural advancement; and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and the other countries of the world.

This act laid the groundwork for strengthening the international exchanges in two major ways. One was by incorporating future funding as a line item in the general congressional budget rather than on the declining overseas sale of surpluses. The other was by allowing foreign entities to provide funding to the American side of programming for the first time. These changes put the program on solid financial footing that has survived to this day. The most significant impact of the Fulbright-Hays Act for the history of tourism in the United States is the establishment of the J-1 Visa. The J-1 and its associated cultural exchanges were overseen by United States Information Agency (USIA) from their inception in 1961 until 1999. The primary mission of the USIA was one of public relations, effectively promoting the policies of the United States (vis-à-vis the Soviet Union) to the rest of the world. In other words, it was the propaganda arm of the U.S. government aimed at persuading citizens of other countries to favor the United States. While many of the agency’s functions lay in its broadcast and communication efforts, cultural exchanges were administered as part of another division of the USIA. This included the Fulbright Scholarship Program, but after 1961 also included non-immigrant scholars coming to the United States to educate or serve a particular temporary educational purpose such as a research project or teaching classes. These were the first J-1s. Over time J-1 programs expanded to 15 separate types: Au Pair, Camp Counselor, College and University Student, Government Visitor, Intern, International Visitor, Physician, Professor, Research Scholar, Secondary School Student, Short-Term Scholar, Specialist, Summer Work Travel, Teacher, and Trainee (see Table 3.1 for their current proportional use). In 1965, the most important of these, the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program began welcoming foreign university students to work for up to four months during their long break from school between academic years. However, as Bowman and Bair (2017) in their excellent work into the regulatory history and intent of the SWT program illustrate, very little is now known about its use and regulation for almost 20 years as it had never received any mention in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) until 1983. At that time the International Communication Agency proposed new rules in 1981 that would properly codify the SWT, Trainee, and Camp Counselor programs to set boundaries for their use and prevent the sort of adverse effects associated with the Bracero Program. A few important pre-placement provisions were included: 1) balanced reciprocity between SWT participants coming to the United States and young Americans

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enjoying equivalent temporary work abroad. 2) A delayed arrival if employment was not prearranged in order to give Americans the first chance to secure summer work. 3) sponsors should ensure plans to geographically disperse SWT participants to prevent clustering. Table 3.1: J-1 Program Participants 2019. J- Program SWT

Participants ,,

College and University

,

Intern

,

Research Scholar

,

Camp

,

Secondary

,

Au Pair

,

Short term Scholar

,

International Visitor

,

Alien Physician

,

Government Visitor

,

Teacher

,

Trainee

,

Specialist

,

Professor



Despite these regulations, the J-1 began to garner scrutiny throughout the early 1990s, particularly in reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which found several programs, including the SWT, deficient in the requisite cultural and educational components envisioned in the Fulbright-Hayes legislation. Furthermore, it found the USIA lacking in its ability to properly oversee the program and enforce its provisions. At this time, the USIA also reviewed its own programs and concluded that they were wanting in their original intent and that furthermore they had all along been operating without congressional authorization! The latter status was remedied in 1998 when Congress granted full legal authorization to USIA to administer the programs it was already de facto running while at the same time not requiring the agency to enforce pre-placement requirements. This important step allowed USIA to strip away the CFR pre-placement regulations from 1983, a move that

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subsequently set the stage for the massive growth of the SWT program in the following decade (Bowman & Bair, 2017). Since 1999, the responsibility of the J-1 visa programs has lain within the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the Department of State which took over when the USIA ended. The ECA Bureau itself is housed under the auspices of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, the wing of the Department of State that deals with public outreach. The ECA is organized into nine different offices. Of these, the Office of Private Sector Exchange oversees the Exchange Visitor Program. This includes the Summer Work Travel, Trainee, and Intern programs that comprise the main categories which tourism and hospitality businesses leverage to find employees. From the time of its establishment until now, the SWT program, along with trainee and intern programs to a lesser degree, has become an instrumental piece of the complex labor market that characterizes seasonal tourism areas of the United States. The ubiquity and palpable impacts of the SWT program drive us to consider the importance of a visa that was established to promote cultural exchange, but has also courted controversy over the past couple decades as some scholars, social activists, and even government officials themselves have come to question if all aspects of the program still meet its intended purpose (Bowman & Bair, 2017; Ropkey, 2018; Sinakhone, 2013; Terry, 2018). It is a notion that clearly has gotten under the skin of some people close to the program. More than once during the process of researching this topic I came across individuals working in a position related to the SWT program with sponsors or government agencies who politely took issue with labelling J-1 students as “guestworkers.” Their point was that while J-1s (or SWTs as I will commonly refer to them throughout this work) are here to experience American culture first, and their functions as employees are the means by which they get to accomplish that goal. Furthermore, to label them as guestworkers points toward a more calculating view of them. And perhaps that is exactly the point of the critique. Despite arguments on both sides, in this work I continue to refer to J-1 students as guestworkers because despite the intentions of the program, that is what they are at a definitional level. They are foreign nationals in the United States earning a wage, on a temporary basis, after which they are politely invited to leave the country. They are categorically guestworkers even if the overall intent is one of cultural exchange. This fundamental disagreement is perhaps the driving force behind the new brand identity the J-1 visa programs received in 2020. While the J-1 is still the actual visa category that allows international students to come to the United States, DOS now calls its exchange visa program “BridgeUSA.” According to the agency, “the new BridgeUSA branding is the culmination of a multi-year endeavour to re-imagine the private sector component of the EVP. The goal of the rebrand is to create a professional brand for the private sector component of the EVP to more effectively communicate its mission, program values, and global impact to stakeholders and audiences.” The timing of the new branding

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reflects an intent to refocus attention on exchange programs toward its core mission of creating bonds with other countries through individuals. The public image of the program had suffered a black eye following a scandal in the early 2010s when SWTs went on strike alleging housing and workplace abuses, something detailed in chapter seven. This prompted DOS to subsequently make further changes to the SWT program, but the stain had followed the program around ever since. Ultimately, despite the fact that both the J-1 BridgeUSA SWT and the H-2B are clearly in place to bring in foreign nationals to work, there are still fundamental differences between the two visa programs. The separate histories of establishment of these two visas play an important role in how they function in the labor markets of tourism dependent areas. The next chapter discusses how the state has arranged and administered each with results that create different types of workers ready for insourcing.

4 Pushing the Boulder up the Hill When considering labor in seasonal tourism industries, there is good reason to show concern about the less savory aspects of low-skilled, contingent, and precarious work. But that does not mean that all positions in the permanent group of core workers are without their own stresses. The reality is that management is consistently faced with the unenviable annual task of finding enough seasonal workers to survive the peak bump in tourists; a feat that can only be described as Sisyphean in scope. Even when they succeed in fully staffing one year, they must start over again the next. The sheer scale of this challenge drives human resource managers to do whatever they can to find and recruit workers with any strategies they have in their toolbox. While each place in the tourism landscape presents its own particularities, both assets and challenges, hiring managers show remarkable similarities in the reasons that they turn to utilizing the J-1 and H-2B visa programs.

Resorting to Guestworkers After the H-2B Visa was split apart from the H-2A in the 1986 IRCA legislation, it took some time before it started being used in large numbers across the country in hotels and resorts. How the H-2B came to be used in South Carolina provides a glimpse into the shifting labor market and desperation of tourism industry managers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One key person during this time was Elsa, who now owns a recruiting agency that helps companies to insource workers on the H-2B visa. As a third-party intermediary, they serve to assist organizations to not only find foreign workers, but also navigate the bureaucratic hurdles associated with utilizing the H2B. Elsa had previously worked as a human resources director at a resort in Myrtle Beach, where she had to learn to deal with the difficult task of finding enough workers to clean villas, condominiums, and hotel rooms spread out across the large property. Her story of how she turned to the H-2B in her time as an HR director is historically significant in accounting for how guestworkers have become an essential part of the tourism and hospitality workforce in the state and country: I filed the very first H-2B application for hotels in the state of South Carolina. They’d never had one filed before. The process was so much different then compared to what it is now. But yeah it was back in 1989 or 1990 it was the first one that had ever been filed in the whole state. And the state didn’t know what they were doing and I didn’t know what I was doing, and so it was a learning experience for everybody involved. But it certainly was a very valuable experience. Yeah the very first one was filed for my resort at the time. We needed 115 housekeepers every day of the week pretty much from starting, usually from the 1st of March through Thanksgiving, on average. And I could not find them, absolutely could not find them! We did all kinds of things. I mean we went to churches; we went to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-004

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community events; we went to political rallies; we went to the employment security commissions in Williamsburg, in Georgetown, in Marion, in Horry County, Conway, we went to Brunswick City, we went to Columbus City, everywhere that was in an hour’s drive or maybe an hour and a half from Myrtle Beach. We went and did . . . I mean I can’t tell you how many churches I went to and how many Chicken balls I threw . . . It was the most ridiculous thing I ever saw. I felt like a politician. I would go into these churches and depending how much money you gave determined how long you could speak. But I did meet a lot of really nice people who tried to help me. There were a lot of community organizers who would get people there. And they were trying to help the people. It’s just that it wasn’t a fantastic job. I mean it’s a job that has to be done, but there was nothing glamorous about it and it was actually hard work. And then you had to ride a bus. Because then we contracted with these different providers, there was just . . . I’ve never found a public transit authority, especially in a resort town, that actually worked for employees. We contracted with three or four different . . . . .the Pee Dee regional transit authority, I remember them coming out of Marion county. We contracted with them to run the minibuses for us. And in the beginning we’d have two buses, because . . . . and by Friday we’d be lucky if we had five people on the bus. Because they could figure out real quickly they didn’t want to do that. The turnover was just, we couldn’t even measure it. It was like, before you could get them on payroll, they were already gone. So what I did was, and . . . . . . on their third day working they would bring to my office this form they had to fill out for their unemployment compensation, and at that time if was the Welfare-To-Work, Clinton days. So if you could actually prove that you had a job, you could still continue your benefits for a while. But you still had to show them, because we had hired them we would record them as hired. So if I filled out that paperwork immediately, they would be gone within three or four days. But if I held onto it until at least the first paycheck, then I could increase the average that they would stay by at least two weeks. It took me awhile to figure that out, but that’s what I had to end up doing. Now were they productive during that time? No. I probably should have just let them go ahead and leave. But we did all kind of things, like we did something called trash and carry. Where in the morning, all the managers, it didn’t matter what your title was, all titles were checked at the door. You came down to housekeeping, you got your assignment, your list of rooms. You went to every room that was on your list and you would remove all the dirty linens and take out all the trash. So that would save the housekeeper, 15 minutes or 10 minutes . . . whatever the time it took, save them time so that hopefully they could turn that room quicker. So we were doing things like that. I mean if you could think of it we were doing it. Well I happened to be talking to a friend of mine who lived in Miami. And they were on their way to meet a guy who worked for Florida East Coast Travel Services. And I said, ‘well who are these . . . . what are you going there for?’ And they said, ‘My husband, they processed visas for my husband’s vegetable farm. ‘And I was, ‘vegetable farm? Visa?’ What kind of? And that’s how it started, I was like ‘what kind of visas and vegetables, what are you talking about?’. And she said, ‘well we can’t find anyone to pick our vegetable crops, or our sugar cane, and our citrus crop.’ And I said ‘wow, I said, do you mind giving me her name.’ So they did and I called them, and there was a guy named Craig, I’ll never forget him as long as I live. Craig said ‘yeah there’s hotels that do this. There’s a hotel in Michigan, we bring in like 300 workers for it, it was the Grand Hotel in Michigan and they’ve been doing this thing forever.’ . . . long story short, I investigated it and found out that you could file this certification application for foreign nationals. Well you can get the form, it’s pretty easy . . . fill out the form and you think oh that’s all I got to do that should be real easy.. Well there’s a lot more to it than just that, but

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anyway, I did get the form; I gave it to the local employment security commission, a guy named Charlie. I’ll never forget him. He’s dead now. He was the assistant director, the one there in Myrtle Beach. We filed the application and he didn’t know what to do with it, so he called Columbia. Her name is Regina, something, but Regina didn’t know anything about it either. So anyway we figured it out. It took a long time to figure it out, a lot of money in attorney fees. But we got approved finally after much sweat and grief and um had our workers. We got them all from Jamaica. We chose Jamaica only because it was close, and at that time, everybody that we interviewed had experience working in hotels. Some working in villas, some working in condos, some working in hotels, so it was a perfect match for the experience that we needed. And they spoke English which was a big deal for us, because nobody in Myrtle Beach at that time spoke anything other than English. So we got the workers; it saved our business. It saved . . . I mean it was a savior for us, we were able to finally for the first time ever to be fully staffed. People who knew what to do, and it was just almost, you could just feel it in the air, the excitement of not having to go down every morning and get the trash and all the managers, they could actually do what they were hired to do. And the workers were happy because they had a job. They could work legally, which made them proud as well, but it created a sense of accomplishment for them too, because now they were able to come and earn money legally, but also take care of their families back home. And so for the first time their children might be able to go to school. Or they might be able to purchase that car or start building a room onto their house.

It is interesting to note that while the H-2B had been developed roughly four years prior, it was only by chance that she had learned of its potential. It is also clear that once it had been discovered by the tourism and hospitality industry, it was quickly seen as a way forward in dealing with seasonality and the poor reputation of the jobs on offer. While Elsa was clearly an early pioneer in navigating the bureaucracy of importing guestworkers, she was also an entrepreneur who could envision how she could use her knowledge to both her personal advantage and that of human resource directors around the country: And then the hotels in Myrtle Beach, it’s a small town, and I knew a lot of the players in that town; still do to this day, and some of them are still some of my clients. The general managers would ask, ‘well how’d you do that, we want these workers too.’ Will you do it for us? So we formed a little association, called the hospitality employers association in MB. It was about 8 or 9 hotels at that time. They actually would pay a small amount to the association, and I would file the petitions for every one of those hotels. So that’s how it kind of started in that town where we started bringing in the Jamaicans. And we did that for about 4 or 5 years. And then in December of 1996 the parent organization decided to sell the hotel. And as I say, my employers at that time were also equity partners in that. So when they were leaving my options were to stay there or I could go work at another one of their hotels. We weighed all those options, but one of the key options for me was this business. So we started my company in December 1996. Where what I did was I expanded the idea about the association to become a for profit organization where not only did we file for of course in Myrtle Beach but throughout the U.S. So that’s how it got started. It was only word of mouth. We did very little advertising. I knew hundreds of people in this industry, so I let them all know we were doing this. And its grown from there. And great years before 9/11, it was exploding. It was wonderful. We had probably 6 to 7,000 workers in the country.

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Even without Elsa’s efforts the H-2B would have eventually found its use in the industry, but it is likely that she is one of just a handful of players who facilitated the rapid expansion of the program in the 1990s. Her experiences illustrate the shifting conditions that today have continually been replicated in local places throughout the country that have made the use of guestworkers so attractive to tourism and hospitality industries. Ultimately, the challenges these businesses face in finding workers are ones based in the geographies of seasonal resort areas. It is in these places that wider socio-economic processes and shifts become grounded and embedded as they combine with the particularities of local places. In this way the local contexts matter to how and why worker shortages exist in an industry that should theoretically be fully staffed even in times of high unemployment. The remainder of this chapter explores several of the factors that managers tasked with finding workers continually report as contributory to their cyclical struggle.

Location, Location, Location The unfortunate reality of so many places that are attractive to tourists is that they are located far from major population centers and/or in locations that are only fully functional throughout a portion of the year. When tourism exists in remote places with the additional burden of distinct seasons, the result is that both the local and internal labor markets tend to be resultantly weak (Lundberg et al., 2009; Solnet et al., 2014). In short, the labor pool from which to draw seasonal workers is relatively small and it is difficult to train and promote existing workers from within an enterprise because most are not employed throughout the year. A North Carolina Mountain resort club manager succinctly described to me the local situation, “up here we’ve got a small labor pool of – not much.” Isolation is often a result of physical geography that places an actual barrier on movement from other population centers as in the case of islands and/or historical settlement patterns that limited the size of the population in a place that is now a tourism hotspot. The latter is seen in many inland mountain resorts or valleys that otherwise would not have supported a large population at any time of the year. The shortage of qualified workers can also be exacerbated at times when the tourism profile of an area is enlarging and hiring managers face intense competition from newly opening hotels and attractions (Stratton, 2014). Occasionally resorts or hotels that are within a metropolitan area but still a good driving distance from most of the population can feel both the weight of competition and remoteness. Natalie, a hiring manager for a coastal resort 45 minutes outside Charleston, South Carolina, alluded to both location and the competition from other businesses as primary factors in her difficulty of finding local workers:

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Yeah, there’s definitely an isolation. I think for us there is a little bit of that. That’s going to affect us . . . I do think that, again, the number of resort hotels and restaurants in Charleston have grown astronomically over the past many years . . . We pay more than any other hotel and resort in this area in order to make sure we’re the most competitive. Because if I could steal them all (workers) from all of those other hotels, I’d do it. It’s just that it’s a constant battle.

For places like this, distance can be a limiting factor. Why would a worker choose an otherwise equivalent job when it is over 30 minutes farther to reach by car, costing both extra time and money for fuel? It is not a surprise that Natalie’s resort must offer higher wages to attract enough workers away from the competition within the population center. Such relative isolation is actually a factor that the Department of Labor weighs when making decisions on whether to certify employers to be able to hire H-2B workers, even if the employer has demonstrated an unsuccessful attempt to hire locally. Such a case was described by a Larry, a Cape Cod labor recruiter: We’ve tried filling positions for companies in Boston and the government has said, no, this is Boston. You’ve got enough of an unemployment problem in big cities. You can find people, you just got to open up your resources. Whereas, if you’re going to upstate Maine, you’ve got a retired population or you’ve got a population that already has their full-time job. So there’s nobody there . . . So if you’re seeking, let’s say a waitstaff in Boston proper up by Boston university, you’re probably better off not filing for the application only because you know, you’re going to have those people in the city proper, someone’s going to want to work at least some part of that job. So it’s not frequent for them to deny it, but we have heard of them denying within the big cities within major populated areas.

Larry conceded that such denials due to total labor market size is relatively rare, and indeed some of the hotels and resorts included in this study were located in decentlysized cities, in businesses that also featured specifically seasonal peaks in tourist demand. One example is found in Asheville, North Carolina, a city in the Blue Ridge Mountains that has experienced rapid growth over the past few decades. It has become both a regional culinary and craft brewing hot spot with both independent microbreweries and larger-scale breweries like Sierra Nevada investing in new operations; it is now the city with the second most breweries per capita in the United States (Lunsford, 2019). All of this serves to contribute to its ongoing position as a gateway to mountain tourism with both the famous Biltmore Estate and Blue Ridge Parkway as major attractions. It is here that Debra, who serves as the chief human resources manager at a large hotel finds constant difficulty adequately staffing various positions: I think one specific challenge for us right now in our area is, it’s a positive thing that we are growing so much in hospitality and restaurants and breweries and hotels in the Asheville area, we have a shortage of skilled hospitality staff. I mean I bring in about 120 students a year from culinary and pastry schools and hospitality schools to train with us, and hopefully most of them can stay with us. And we still have a shortage of finding cooks in the area.

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It is also important to note from Debra’s comments that there is a general disconnect between the ways that tourism and hospitality positions are generally regarded as low-skilled and the reality that managers want people with training and abilities to do specific jobs. But even with jobs that do not require any skills or experience, Debra has found that attracting good workers presents largely the same challenge because of the seasonal nature of the business. we’ve been using this program since 2000 and we were forced to because we couldn’t find staff to open our new hotel and do the things that we need to do on property. And it is a very seasonal company. Our season is a long season. I usually am able to prove our season from March to January. So a lot of local folks from what we understand don’t, um, their reasons for not accepting jobs when we offer them to them are that they want higher pay, even though it’s above minimum. The main reason is that they don’t just want a temporary seasonal job. And a lot of them can’t pass the drug test and background check, believe it or not. And it’s just a lot of I think especially the younger generation, they’re not really wanting the line level, unskilled labor jobs. You know everybody’s ready to come in and be a supervisor and run the place. And we need those folks who are just happy to be a dishwasher or clean rooms. And there’s very few local folks that we can accept those positions and can pass the standards for those positions.

Here in addition to seasonality, Debra notes a self-imposed impediment to finding staff in the form of employee drug testing. This was an issue I was surprised to see initially as someone who spent his teenage years working in restaurants. The stark reality of restaurant culture in much of the United States is that recreational drug use, mostly in the form of marijuana, is exceedingly common. In other words, any restaurant managers that actually want to have staff must accept the fact that many workers will likely be smoking marijuana in their time off, or they will have no staff. It is important to note that I mostly found the issue of drug testing at upmarket resorts that were trying to keep their workforce operating at the highest standards. This apparently has been a lesson learned the hard way. At Natalie’s resort drug testing had been a policy in force five years earlier when I had spoken to a different director. But when I spoke with her in 2020, the situation had obviously changed: to be honest, we as employers are so desperate, and this is not just us. I’ve talked to a solid group of HR directors for different hotels and resorts around Charleston, and nobody’s preemployment testing anymore. We are drug free, so if you have an accident we test. We tell them we’re drug free, but nobody is pre-employment drug testing anymore, because again, we’re trying to, which sounds terrible, but we’re trying to make sure it doesn’t limit. We are just looking for anybody that is willing to do these jobs. It’s tough.

The fact that human resource directors have been forced to reevaluate their standards with regard to what appears to have been a long-standing industry norm in the form of pre-employment drug testing is telling. One can’t help but get a sense of desperation that resort and hotel managers must face in meeting the demand. It is a desperation also created in part by another trend that both Debra and Natalie also alluded to, the lack of young seasonal workers.

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Where are the Kids? For a long while the United States displayed a cyclical pattern in which a natural demand for seasonal workers was met by a fairly regular return of young people who wanted easily accessible temporary work. Ruth, a long-time hotel owner in Jackson, Wyoming, who now heavily utilizes both the J-1 and H-2B programs in addition to hiring American workers, reflected on the importance of the youth cohort to her business: In the earlier days, we were very dependent on high school kids and college kids in the summer. To some extent we still are, but I remember lobbying so fiercely with school boards and stuff, because we didn’t want school to start before Labor Day and we didn’t want it to run too late in spring ‘cause we were totally seasonal.

However, this annual rite of passage experienced by thousands of young Americans, “The Great American Summer Job,” found near beaches and in mountain resort towns across America has slowly changed over the past several decades (Desilver, 2019). Where once employers in the United States could count on numerous young people to scoop ice cream, bus tables, operate rides or serve as life guards during their summer break from school, today they simply cannot rely on them consistently in the numbers found in the past. Teenagers (ages 16–19) in general have seen the most consistent declines in their labor force participation rate over the past four decades. In 1979 at its peak, the rate was 57.9%, dropping to 52% in 2000, before ultimately crashing to roughly 34% after massive declines during the great recession around 2007 (Morisi, 2017). It has hovered around this mark ever since. This shift in the working patterns of a cohort spanning only four years has been so massive it has dragged down the overall rate of labor force participation for all ages. According to at least one study from the Brookings Institute, if teens had held steady to their rate in 2000, the overall rate would have been 1.33 percentage points higher in 2018 (Bauer et al., 2019). Of course, these numbers include the entire year, and for most seasonal tourism employers the summer labor force participation rate is most relevant to their businesses. Indeed, the summer has historically showcased a spike in the teenage workforce during the school break. In recent years, this pattern still holds true, but so does the trend in the decline of the summertime labor participation rate (see Figure 4.1). The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses the rate in July to determine summer figures. Here the drop between the peak of 71.8% in 1978 to the 43.2% in 2016 is even more precipitous than the overall rate, suggesting that summertime activities for youth in America has changed more dramatically than it has for school year working behaviors (Morisi, 2017). The numbers have been most drastic for teenage workers, however young American workers (20–24) have also shown declines in their rate of workforce participation as well. It should be noted, however, that even with these overall lower rates of summer employment, teen employment in accommodation and food service industries actually rose 38% between 2000 and 2018 according to BLS data. On the

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other hand, their work in retail fell by 41% in the same timeframe (Desilver, 2019). Considering that jobs in tourism-dependent areas involve both sectors it may be a case of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Also the BLS data displaying these trends are aggregated to the national scale so it is entirely possible that these trends may not hold steady in specific seasonal tourism destinations. 70.0

400,000 350,000

Teen Summer LPR

300,000 250,000

60.0 50.0

Teen LPR 40.0

200,000 30.0 150,000 J-1 100,000

20.0 10.0

50,000 0

0.0 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

Figure 4.1: Teen Labor Force Participation Rate and J-1 Visa Issuances 1992–2019. Data source: BLS Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey (16–19 years).

While the current lower rate of summer employment for teenagers has held steady for the better part of the last decade, the BLS is currently projecting the rate to actually fall into the mid-20s by 2024 (Morisi, 2017). It should be noted, however, that this projection was made prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. The long-term effects of the pandemic on the labor market for younger workers, especially in tourism, is still in flux. This all begs the question of why young Americans have decided not to work in the same ways they had in the past. I have certainly noticed what seems like a shift based on my personal experiences. My own teenage years almost exactly spanned the decade of the 1990s. Beginning at 14, I worked during the summers to help pay for my private high school education. By the time I was 16, I and every one of my friends were working after school and on weekends during times when school was in session, and full-time during breaks. Mostly we worked in local restaurants doing jobs suitable for teenagers. I bussed tables throughout high school and into my early university years before ending my time as an admittedly rather lackluster waiter. Later I shifted toward summer warehouse work and finished as a staffer at a local bookseller (my favorite pre-academic job). And while I did participate in various extracurricular activities, I always did so only in addition to earning an income. These expectations were not ones that were drilled into me by parents, but rather ones that were simply the norm at that place and time in Louisville, Kentucky. Craig, an employer at a North Carolina golf club that has long used the H-2B program expressed something very similar.

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Hopefully it will cycle around. You know what I mean? Most of us grew up in a time where, I mean, I started working when I was in my teens at a local country club., I had to cut grass, I had to do whatever they told me to do. I worked all my life. It never occurred to me to not. It was a different time.

Indeed, to not be working would have seemed unusual, and something of a luxury. Yet now as I watch my nieces and nephews move through their own teenage years, I have seen less of that similar imperative to move into the working world. Looking at simply the labor force participation rates may cause one to conclude that the youth of today are somehow lazier or more feckless than their previous generational counterparts. Yet, I do not have this sense when observing my own family. While several have held jobs for a short while, for most of them, their extracurricular activities seem to have much more weight in their lives than for my generation. While these observations are merely anecdotal and limited to the few teenagers with whom I have personal connections, there is evidence to suggest that a shift toward experiences that aid in personal development has been under way for some time. While the trend has been less time spent working, the number of young people not employed or in some form of education or training has remained virtually unchanged (Thompson, 2017). In other words, they are not just loafing around or wallowing in indolence. It would seem that they now are more interested in future aspirations than immediate financial needs. Why this is happening is not altogether clear but there are some potential reasons. Neumark and Shupe (2019), for example, found that increases in minimum wages played a significant role in shaping teenage working behavior toward an increased focus on schooling while simultaneously lowering their demands to engage in low-wage employment. It would seem counterintuitive that higher wages would reduce the number of teens who hold jobs, who surely would love to be paid more; however the explanation given for this phenomenon by economists is that higher minimum wages create more competition for jobs in low-wage occupations as employers demand more skills from their workforce. Employers may simply see a teenage worker with practically no skills or experience not worth what they are required to pay by law. Two groups in particular may be the biggest competition for teenagers. The first is older Americans who are close to full retirement. The oldest group is now working at older ages than ever before, and are often taking jobs in low-end retail or other services that a young person could typically be doing (Thompson, 2017). Adding to this competition for work in low-end jobs are immigrant workers with fewer skills. The share of immigrants with a secondary education or less more than doubled over the past several decades and now comprise a larger share of the adult labor market than in the past. Smith (2012) calculates that the substitutability of this group of worker with very similar labor characteristics has at least in part created downward pressure on the rate of youth employment even if it has not dented the overall labor market for all ages.

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Whatever the combination of factors associated with the decline of young Americans seeking employment, it seems clear that students have learned that they must increase their own attractiveness in order to compete for jobs that now require higher standards. They have also learned that they must compete for their education. While minimum wages may have increased modestly in the last decade, they still do not match the purchasing power of wages from the past, now down almost a third since the peak in 1968 (Cooper, 2019). Meanwhile, the cost of a college education has exploded in the United States to the point that the wages that can be earned in a typical job worked by a high school or university student has had a decreasing ability to match the price of tuition. Stories that Baby Boomers tell of paying their own way through university while working part-time seem ludicrous to young people today. With declining returns associated with being actively employed in one’s youth the incentive of time spent making oneself more competitive for scholarships and grants to pay for an education has increased significantly. The rise in Advanced Placement (AP) and other college credit courses taken in high school makes perfect sense. In this light, one can understand the pressures that young people feel today and why the reported stress levels associated with their education has skyrocketed over the past several decades (Eagan et al., 2016). Whatever the full reasons for the phenomenon may be, the loss of younger workers is something felt acutely in tourism and hospitality industries. Natalie expressed frustrations over the shift in attitudes among young workers: It’s difficult. I do think that the more, as years progress, the younger generation, we’re going into those high schools, and they are really pushed to college, or really don’t see themselves, they don’t look at these kind of blue collar or these kind of more manual labor jobs as something that they’ll ever do. I feel like it’s, even though their parents might be doing it, they think that they are I guess better than that or something. It’s discouraging, because as years go on and this older generation that works in these jobs, once we lose them your shortage is even greater, is the concern. In certain areas.

Ron, the general manager of a large hotel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, who at age 70 has worked in the hotel industry for 40 years also gave his perceptions of youth attitudes to summer work in the coastal hotels: They do not do it anymore. Even down to my son, four or five years ago, I wanted him to learn the business and come and do it and he’s not interested. He just looks at that ocean, he can’t wait to get out there to go surfing. The young kids today are not like they were when I grew up. They just don’t have the interest or the foresight to know that you need to learn something at a young age and then if it’s not what you want to do, at least you have a background, something you always fall back on.

The short story is that younger American workers have collectively decided to forego work in order to develop their own human capital in order to acquire a quality tertiary education in order to eventually qualify for higher-order employment. The time when young people would work in jobs unrelated to their eventual career

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has given way to one of internships, summer education, and study abroad programs (Thompson, 2017). In 2017, the Alliance for International Exchange, an association that represents organizations and companies comprising the educational and cultural exchange community, including sponsors, conducted a review of the J-1 SWT program (Eurekafacts, 2017). The report concluded that this shift toward education in lieu of work was a major contributing factor that helped explain the presence of J-1s in the United States. It furthermore suggested that the J-1s were likely not competing directly with American youth for jobs, but were rather a supplement to it. In this vein, Kylie, a human resources director at a ski resort in Wyoming described as much in their attempts to recruit American students alongside their efforts to access foreign workers: Kylie: That’s the thing, yeah. And we didn’t just, you know, rest our laurels on the J-1 and H2B, I mean, we’re out there, we’re pounding the pavement, we have a recruiter on full-time who travels everywhere. Author: Like college campuses, that sort of thing? Kylie: Exactly. Exactly, and we still can’t find the kids.

Here Kylie mentions the H-2B program as well, but how youth employment relates to it is perhaps a bit more complicated. H-2B workers tend to be employed in positions that often are not employing teenagers, even if they are employing younger Americans (20–24). Most of the H-2B workers interviewed for this project were either employed in upper-scale resorts in restaurant kitchens or as serving staff, or as room cleaners. While some teenagers may be employed in certain restaurant and cleaning positions, often these jobs, especially those in the kitchen, require skills and experience that teenagers are unlikely to have. Furthermore, most of the locations that hire H-2Bs reported deliberately not hiring J-1 workers due to their short-term commitment and lack of skills and motivation. In fact, most of the H-2Bs I interviewed were older by at least five to 10 years compared to the J-1s who were all enrolled in foreign universities and colleges. That said, it is likely that the decline of youth employment even for the seasonal jobs that rely on the H-2B is at least an indirect factor in the shortage of local workers, even if the relationship may not be as strong as it is for J-1s. Whether or not this is an overall positive trend is an open question. It certainly appears to have impacts for employers who could use these students during periods of peak demand. For the young people who could be gaining work experience but instead trade this time for more focused skills development, the jury is still out. There is probably no easy answer as there are likely to be as many answers to that question as there are young Americans who have made that choice. Regardless of what this means for young workers no longer working in tourism, the loss of their labor affords the businesses that relied on it much less flexibility in dealing with peak seasonal demand. Importantly, flexibility is at the heart of what employers want.

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Most Days We Just Lay Around the Castle In many of the interviews with employers a common refrain emerged regarding the quality of the local workers and their willingness to work. Much of the language used to describe them revealed frustration based on their repeated experiences not only getting workers to apply, but also in retaining them once they had been hired. Natalie spoke of one particular applicant who was particularly bold in the way he decided not to work once hired: I mean, you’re constantly . . . We’re probably doing more, because we are constantly doing job fairs and things. It’s just that you’re having not many people apply, and then the people that apply are not responding. You can call them, you can email them. Sometimes you get a person and they agree to an interview, and then they no-show. Right now we had a gentleman, we did an interview, we offered him the job. He’s missed orientation three different times. He didn’t show up for the first day. We kept on calling him, and he did answer, which was nice, and we rescheduled him, then we rescheduled him (again). Then the last one he called and said he was running 10 minutes late, and we said, ‘Great. We’ll see you soon.’ He didn’t show up.

Remarkably similar stories emerged regardless of location and across different types of tourism jobs. Amber, who manages a crew of lifeguards for a beach service in coastal North Carolina described her own difficulties in getting Americans who are actually qualified, willing to apply, and ready to accept work: Well I have had several Americans apply in the summer, and they usually wait until the last minute to apply also, which is bad. In my experience, they will submit the application and I’ll send them the next step to employment, which is proof of their lifeguard certification and also proof of their 550 yard swim time. That’s one of our requirements, that they have to be able to swim 550 yards in 10 minutes or less. So I send them the next step to employment and usually I never hear back from them, and I have to keep re-emailing them trying to figure out what’s going on. Or they just don’t email me back but then they won’t call me back when I try to set up and interview. It’s a really hard process trying to actually get them to interview and actually getting them to come here. For example, this past week I was supposed to have someone provide their proof that they can swim their 550 yard swim. So last Monday, I was supposed to train like seven people and only four people showed up and only one could pass their swim test . . . . Every time I see about the employment rate and that kind of stuff, I’m like ‘are you serious?,’ because I have like 100 positions that I could fill right now, and I don’t have a single applicant that is willing to actually do that.

The contrasts that managers often draw between American workers and the guestworkers they employ can be fairly stark and serve to highlight the reasons that they feel compelled to turn to the J-1 and H-2B visas. For Amber, not only does she find reliability in being able to secure workers through the J-1, but also many of them already come to her with skills. In particular, she had found that many of the Bulgarian and other Eastern European students she typically hires through the SWT program come to her as pre-certified lifeguards, which removes some of the consistent problem she finds in the American applicants.

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This discursive dichotomy between the low-skilled American workforce and guestworkers used in tourism industries reflects the overall theoretical purposes that drive employers across the broader economy to prefer migrant workers of all types. In the case of temporary foreign migrant workers who often come alone or at least without immediate family, they typically represent high flexibility to work abnormal schedules and a tolerance or even preference for working more hours. They can do so without worrying about missing quality time with family at their homes or other social obligations. These so-called “target earners” are also looking to make at least a certain amount of money while they are working abroad to justify their time away. All of this makes them particularly valuable as employees, if also particularly vulnerable to unethical employers. It is impossible to know how many employers look to migrant workers specifically to exploit them. Even if we surmise that most are responsible labor market actors and simply want to stay fully staffed, it is hard to fault tourism and hospitality managers for happily employing guestworkers when they are legally made available to them. In the case of Craig, his use of the H-2B came with initial reluctance, giving way to full embrace now that he has seen the level of commitment to the work from those employees: I’ll give you a little history. I arrived here in 2007. Ok and I learned that they had been bringing in Eastern Europeans and people like that. Well I wasn’t used to doing that and I was a purist and I said, ‘I’m going to support the local economy, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to find people right here in my neighborhood to work, and I’m going to bring them up here and I’m going to pay ‘em well and I’m gonna get them to work.’ Well two years later, I gave up. I couldn’t; I could not find enough local people who wanted to work, who would show up for work. Who wouldn’t call in every time they had a hangover or something. I mean. We were in desperate shape. I just could not. I mean I was waiting tables, I was doing everything myself. There was no way around it. I gave up and I said, I need a core. It doesn’t need to be my whole staff. Cause I can find some good local people; I have several that are here. But I said, I need six to eight people that I know darn well, no matter what happens, come hell or high water, they’re going to be here to work. And they’re gonna be professional with my customers, they want to earn money, they’re proud to be here. That’s what I want. And that’s what I did, and it’s the best move I ever made.

It should be noted that Craig’s experiment with eschewing foreign workers in favor of finding workers in the local labor market took place in the wake of the massive spike in unemployment associated with the global recession of 2007. This was a time when, theoretically, he should have had a relatively easy time attracting applicants. Also notable is that the H-2B workers Craig employs and are best understood as peripheral workers under labor market segmentation theories are to him a part of the core who he looks to as a bedrock group to be built upon. While they may be temporary in terms of being seasonal, he is able to hire most of them back for up to three years in a row according to H-2B rules and thus preserve some service continuity. Thus, in the crucible of seasonal resort tourism hiring many of the ways that labor market theorists have come to envision the structure of workforces are spun

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on their heads. Meanwhile, it is many of the local American workers, who would probably represent the core group of workers in other industries, who he contrasts as unreliable: I mean it boggles my brain. And I have to tell you the truth that as an American I’m slightly embarrassed by it, because we are getting out-worked. And I would beg, I would love to be in a position where I didn’t have to hire someone from overseas. If you had given me the quality of the people I need and the volume of the people I need, I’d be thrilled. But the embarrassing thing is that it’s not the internationals that are failing to show up for work or calling in sick when I know they are hung over. It’s the local kids. And I’m thinking, what has happened to our society that the work ethic seems to have disappeared?

In addition to the discourses swirling about American workers as lazy or unmotivated are also those portraying them with an air of entitlement. This narrative emerged in several interviews with employers but perhaps best expressed by Gabe, owner and executive chef at a restaurant in Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. When asked about how he would manage things if the H-2B or J-1 visas were not available, he conceded that he would likely be able to stay open, but that his business would suffer by both lowering service abilities and forcing him to hire people who he views as less than ideal in their level of commitment to the work. He spoke of his experiences in 2017 when extra H-2B visas were not extended in 2017: You just can’t operate optimally. We are a year-round business. So, I have a core staff of people that are here year-round. So if I was unable to acquire any J-1 or H-2B visa workers, the big negative for us is that it empowers crappy people, to require like . . . As soon as this year, as soon as the H-2B, with me it was last year, the H-2Bs got cut. We weren’t going to get any more. We were still looking for people. We had people come in with such attitude, demanding money, saying when they would work. And you’re like, you know what? I’d rather do it myself. No, thank you. So, it empowers crappy people, which is kind of a shame . . . Without the programs, this entire island crumbles. Without a visa, without a foreign worker program, whether it’s H-2B, H-2A, J-1, J-9, they’re helpful sometimes, or whatever other alphabet soup there is, without them, the employees that we have available, like I said before, they’ll start to demand double their salaries, and they’ll work half as hard.

Gabe’s comments reflect certain realities about the way that guestworkers in tourism and hospitality relate to the local labor markets in seasonal resort areas, and also engender some questions about industries that have typically paid relatively low wages to workers regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. They ultimately suggest that there is an inherent tension involved in industries and places that utilize guestworkers. For better or worse, most of the jobs that end up being staffed by guestworkers are those that are stigmatized and paid less. At question is the notion that if wages were to rise as employers become desperate in the absence of guestworker programs would their status and the discourses shaping their public perception also improve as well? Would this in turn lead to higher workforce engagement with tourism work and negate the need to bring in foreign workers? The question remains open-ended and is in reality much more complex than a simple

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dichotomy between pay level and number of job applicants. However, it seems that human resource directors in tourism and hospitality are fully aware of this fundamental problem of low wages in their sector. Many, like Natalie, alluded to the fact that they already pay more than the local average for their workers in order to stay competitive with other hotels and resorts when attracting applicants. Ron also said as much regarding his Myrtle Beach hotel, and went so far as to concede that good workers do merit higher pay: What we’ve found out is when you got a good one, you’ve got to pay them. I mean you got to pay him better than anybody else is paying, you got to raise their salary and take good care of them, thank them over and over and just take a little more care than the people down the street and we tried to do that . . . Well we’ve raised the bar and sometimes they just expect more. Truthfully they do, and rightfully said, they deserve more. Some of them really do, but you got to find that good one to make sure that it’s good, then you reward them. And we have done that, we have brought our starting salaries up on just about every level . . . I’ve even gotten desk clerks that if they are trained, you got to pay them. If they pair good you’ve got to pay them, there’s no $10 an hour anymore. You’ve got to be up and you’ve got to bring money to the table and show them, ‘Look, we’re willing to do this and what would it take to get you?’ And you got to really do better than that because costs to living, to get car payments, food and everything else.

On one hand, from the perspective of employers, utilizing guestworkers makes complete sense to anyone looking to hire sufficient staff. They come ready, willing, and able to work and can be relied upon in ways that any employer would probably expect from any worker. It is difficult to blame any individual manager who plays by the rules, treats their workers well, but also finds assurance and stability in a legally sanctioned guestworker program. At the same time, the conditions that typically compel many migrant workers to choose to go abroad are the same that make them a highly flexible and motivated workforce. In essence, inequalities baked into the global political economy serve to mobilize workers and make them attractive as employees. This is not always true in the case of the J-1 visa, since many students come from relatively privileged backgrounds, but it is certainly true of the H-2B that mostly draws workers from poorer countries with higher unemployment. Also, it is possible to consider how the presence of a temporary workforce has the potential to erode the position from which workers on the lower end of the labor market might negotiate higher wages. If guestworkers can be found that will work for wages that do not attract and/or retain local workers, why would businesses need to raise their wages at all?

Structural Unemployment? While employers were very forthcoming in detailing the facts of their labor shortages, some ventured further to suggest reasons that they felt that American workers are in short supply. Some have already been detailed, like the relative isolation of

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resort areas. However, another thing some managers suggest is that they are also forced to compete with the unemployment system. This often-repeated premise is that workers who might otherwise be working for them are instead collecting unemployment checks at home. Many of the managers interviewed had a similar story or anecdote to share regarding their feelings on this issue. Craig, in particular, detailed his experiences with the system when hiring for his club in North Carolina: I’ve actually hired people from that process. I’m not trying to play a game with the government. What I do, the first several years I’ve had work, the government required me, they sent me a list of who was looking for work in the area, they were in the unemployment rolls. I sent them a certified letter and told them to come on up. And I’ve actually hired some people from there. Because I say, hey, if I can find a good employee, I’ll take em. But you’ve heard the stories. I’ve offered people interviews, and then they no-show for the interview. I’ve had people walk in and show up for the job, and say, well I don’t want the job your advertising, here’s what I want. Well I say that’s not what I’m advertising, that’s not what I’m looking for. Well I don’t want that job. Well OK . . . It’s laughable. You cannot believe how many times most of the people just don’t show up for the interview. They call, and I’m pretty sure they tell their unemployment people they’re going for an interview and never show up. It lets them keep their unemployment benefits for a few more weeks. Now that may change because the state of NC has tightened down their rules of unemployment. They’ve made it very tough, and they’ve cut the amount of benefits significantly.

The degree to which the structure of the unemployment system in the United States contributes to the lack of decent applicants is beyond the scope of this work. In fact, a major public discussion is currently in progress at the time of this writing about a national worker shortage in all manner of low-skilled industries. Much of the debate centers on whether strong unemployment benefits disincentivizes workers from returning to the labor force. Regardless of the answer, the discourse surrounding unemployment (and welfare) in this country is a strong motivator for political action.

Housing and Transportation All of the challenges so far identified are significant in their contributions to labor shortages in seasonal tourism resorts in their own right, but they are all made more acute by a singular overarching issue that permeated just about every aspect of this entire investigation into guest work: the lack of affordable workforce housing. On one hand, there have been ongoing widespread reports of a nationwide housing shortage throughout the United States. As of 2020, for every 100 renters with very low incomes, there were only 36 affordable and available rental homes on average, which leads to 71% spending over half of their incomes on housing costs (NLIHC, 2020). Several factors help to explain this shortage including national housing policies that incentivize home ownership over renting, local restrictive zoning laws that effectively limit the expansion of higher density housing developments, and the

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high costs of construction (Sisson et al., 2019). The latter has been all the more exacerbated by the skyrocketing cost of building materials during the COVID-19 pandemic (Morris, 2021). While the factors of the housing affordability crisis are national in scope, they are magnified in the context of seasonal tourism areas. For one, tourism is predominantly labor intensive, and the workers not only require places to live, but also services to sustain them. Economic geography, urban planning, and other related fields of study have long acknowledged a distinction between basic and non-basic sectors of the economy, the former referring to activities that sell goods and services to those outside the local area, that latter are those that function locally. The ratio between the number of workers in each sector can vary, however with more basic sector workers, there becomes a need for services to cater to those workers in the basic sector, as well as those who work in the non-basic sector. As basic sectors grow the need for non-basic sector workers grow even more in a sort of feedback loop. Sometimes it can be difficult to draw a neat line between the sort of jobs that could be grouped into one or the other as tourism is often labeled as a type of export due to money being generated from a population visiting from outside the local area. Indeed, many services provided to tourists or short-term residents are also those that are utilized by local workers. However, we might conceptualize this ratio, it is clear that housing shortages affect workers in both sectors and provide a real threat to the social sustainability of places that cannot sufficiently house their workers, those who serve the tourists, AND those who serve locals workers. The problem of non-affordability strikes tourism and hospitality workers particularly hard as a group that receives lower wages on average for their services. The isolation and exclusivity of resort areas also tend to limit the supply of housing even as demands may increase. Often these tourism dependent areas exist in places that have a small footprint on which to build housing either due to natural limitations or due to “not in my backyard” attitudes that seek to keep the low-cost housing out of areas associated with affluence or leisure. Furthermore, space for workforce housing is in constant competition with space for housing tourists. What limited housing does exist, does so in a free market that virtually ensures that costs will rise precipitously. Part of the problem is that the areas that tourists find so desirable to visit are also attractive to those who can afford a build a second holiday home for longer-term vacations. One can now envision a sort of lifestyle-led gentrification aided by the rise in digital communication technologies that have freed the wealthy classes of the world to invest in housing in otherwise remote places (Sigler & Wachsmuth, 2020). The amenity-rich nature of these destinations effectively creates a sort of external demand that serves to distort local housing market structures in ways that are not consistent with the demands and demographics of the year-round population. In this way, local developers or existing landlords find greater profit in supplying wealthier clients (often from wealthier areas of the country or world) with ever more expensive homes (Biagi et al., 2012).

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These homes are thus taken out of circulation for the local workforce who can no longer afford them, at the same time that the influx of wealthy tourists creates a greater demand for more workers, thereby expanding the gap between the number of workers who need housing and the places available to them. The results are somewhat similar to those accompanying gentrification in the many urban areas of the United States when lower-income residents become locked out of their own communities either by being priced out of home purchases and rental properties or losing their existing homes as property tax payments move out of their reach. The gentrification of amenity-rich tourism destinations in mountain and coastal communities across the United States leaves these places with an unenviable dilemma. While on one hand the influx of capital from a highly mobile transnational upper class that might otherwise not be available for reinvestment may be welcomed, it generally comes at risk of displacement of long-time residents (Long et al., 2012; Sigler & Wachsmuth, 2015). Local resident displacement in tourism areas is also hastened by another relative newcomer that further competes with the workforce for housing. Much as improvements in internet connectivity has facilitated the movement of wealthy residents to remote amenity-rich areas, the rise of the so-called “sharing economy” has increased the conversion of homes otherwise occupied by local residents into accommodations reserved for tourists. While short-term rental properties are by no means a new phenomenon, the innovations in web-based services that have connected travelers with individual property owners has been transformational over the past 25 years. In 1995 VRBO (Vacation Rental by Owner) became the first online platform that allowed travelers to search for rental properties and directly book with owners. Others such as HomeAway and Booking emerged later until the arrival of Airbnb in 2008. The Airbnb model in particular provided the innovative catalyst to supercharge the market as the first to allow the rental of portions of homes and the use of credit card booking (“The History of Short-Term Rentals,” 2019). Altogether these new platforms served to bring down the costs of transactions for the property owners and technologically solve logistical problems of connecting a wider base of people who could find their properties in places that had few local resources to do so (Bivens, 2019; Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018). After its first 11 years, Airbnb had facilitated the stay of half a billion travelers and now boasts over six million accommodations listed on their website (Sherwood, 2019). These short-term properties present particular challenges to the places where they have emerged in significant numbers. Due to the informal or at least nontraditional nature in which these properties are leased, they often are able to avoid lodging taxes that are levied on traditional hotel rooms. Also, due to their low-profile and sporadic disbursement, owners have an easier ability to skirt local zoning laws that disallow lodging in residential areas, the same ones that serve to cluster hotels outside of neighborhoods (Bivens, 2019; Sherwood, 2019). This means that not only are there potentially new tourists added to those staying in traditional hotels and

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resorts, thereby increasing demands for more workers, once again the supply of housing stock is reduced for the workforce. Wachsmuth and Weisler (2018) detail the important implications of an “Airbnb rent gap” (effectively the difference between rents that are currently paid and those potential ones that can be demanded as a short-term rental) that are of particular salience to areas with strong tourism demand. Ultimately the economic incentives to evict long-term tenants in favor of short-term renters that command higher rents is enticingly high, but the conversion of properties into short-term rentals comes at the expense of long-term workforce housing. In many ways, Airbnb and the like have simply exacerbated a condition associated with seasonality that existed before, namely that landlords can find much more profit in renting in the short-term confines of a peak-season than they can in renting to a tenant for an entire year. Finally, as the local workforce starts to be priced out of their own homes they are faced with several options. Among these are leaving altogether to places with more affordable housing to go with stable jobs. Another is conglomerating (or perhaps more accurately, crowding) in housing with other local residents in an effort to spread the costs of housing across more people. Or workers can choose to find more affordable residence at greater distances and commute to their jobs. For workers in lowwage service jobs, the latter option can feel barely adequate. The costs of fuel and time can easily erode the cost-savings associated with commuting for those who own their own transportation. For others who must rely on other forms of public or private mass-transit, such options may either be woefully inadequate or absent altogether considering the relative isolation of many seasonal tourism resort areas. The coastal areas of South Carolina provide an altogether sad if realistic portrait of this condition. The metropolitan area of Myrtle Beach, along the northernmost coastal stretch of the state is rather large in spatial extent, but the regional bus service provided by Coast RTA has been woefully underfunded in comparison to its size. Other regions with a comparable population size to Horry County where the “Grand Strand” is located have transits systems three to four times as large, making for a particularly challenging task to serve both the needs of the year-round community but also the needs of seasonal tourists when they arrive (see Figure 4.2). As late as 2016, Coast RTA was only operating twelve buses to serve a population over 300,000, in part due to its difficulty in accessing funding derived from accommodations taxes paid by tourists to help offset costs associated with tourism. Luckily, on the strength of new management and an infusion of economic aid through the COVID-19 relief Cares Act, the service has been able to increase the number of buses in operation lately to just over 30 while attempting to build a new terminal facility that will be more centrally located (Bright, 2021; Shoemaker, 2020). Ultimately, regional transit authorities like Coast were not originally built to connect inland municipalities to coastal ones. However, the years of neglect of regional transit as the workforce moved further away are evident, and the linkages between the inland population and the coast are still rather piecemeal.

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Figure 4.2: “The Grand Strand”. Source: Map by Author. Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2018.

The issues of housing, gentrification, and transportation are even more evident on Hilton Head Island, located at the very southern end of the South Carolina coast. This sea island, one of many along the stretch of coastline between South Carolina and Georgia were famously home to African slaves who were freed during and after the Civil War where they came to purchase the very land they had worked during their years of bondage. This group known as Gullah-Geechee lived in relative isolation that contributed to the continual development of their own syncretic culture and creole language. Any land that was owned by the Gullah people was continually passed down over multiple generations and they tended to be the only residents even in areas they did not officially own. This was true until the era just after the Second World War when tourism exploded as automobile and other civic infrastructure reached even more remote areas of the country. In 1949, when around 1,100 Gullah residents lived on Hilton Head, two real estate developers purchased around two-thirds of the island with the intention of developing it into an upscale tourism destination. This effort paid dividends when the bridge to the mainland was built in 1956. In subsequent years, tourism and land values skyrocketed. This placed massive pressure on the Gullah people who were met with constant offers to sell their land and in more sinister cases were forced to do so due to the problems associated with heirs property. Because Gullah property has often historically been

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held communally by all living heirs of property owners who died without a written will, each heir (often well over 100) has an equal share to land. A single heir can force an entire property to be sold by demanding the right to sell their share even if they have never lived on the land. If the remaining heirs are not able to satisfy the payment of the share in cash, the entire property is put up for auction. Unscrupulous predatory developers have often taken advantage of this condition by persuading an heir to sell their share only to invoke this right to sell. In Hilton Head the value of the land has risen from $50 per acre in the 1950s to over $800,000 today, meaning that Gullah heirs often have no ability to pay. Thus between forced sales of heirs property and rising property taxes, the Gullah people have steadily lost title and access to their land, and now only hold about 1,000 total acres out of 25,000 (Cary, 2019; Day, 2019; Hazzard, 2012). The loss of property is not reserved for Gullah, but a problem shared across African American communities countrywide. Black Americans lost roughly 90% of their farmland from 1910 to 1997, stripping them of hundreds of billions of dollars that should have contributed to accumulated generational wealth, but instead represents a massive racial wealth gap (Presser, 2019). This gap is all the more pronounced considering that the number of acres owned by white farmers increased in that period, now holding around 98% of all farmland in the country (Gilbert et al., 2002). While tourism development continued to grow over several decades, the local population grew, including newer Latino immigrants who became part of the essential workforce. Over time, as land in Hilton Head steadily shifted toward ownership by wealthy residents and tourism businesses, fewer and fewer of these working-class citizens remained to carry the load that was increasingly demanded in tourism and hospitality services. Workforce shortages started to become apparent in the early 2000s and have become increasingly severe in the years since. Over 8,000 workers are required to perform the vast array of services associated with maintaining hotels, restaurants, rental homes that are visited by over 2.6 million annual visitors (Heffernan & Lurye, 2016). Yet, the footprint is shrinking on which to house them. The few remaining lower-income properties are becoming more expensive as previous ones have been torn down to make room for higher-end development, or in a sharp twist of irony have been purchased by resorts and converted to housing for their H2B workers. Many of these workers have now moved across the bridge to the mainland town of Bluffton, South Carolina where rents are less expensive, and which has experienced its own rapid growth over the past couple of decades. Unfortunately for on-island businesses, many of these workers have opted to work in the hospitality positions closer to their homes in Bluffton rather than commute (Lurye, 2016a). This newer commuting population now exists in addition to an even longer distance commuting population that emerged in the 1970s when Hilton Head began importing workers from nearby rural counties. Today, some of the these workers ride a daily bus from inland communities up to two and a half hours away. It is a grueling fivehour round-trip commute from mostly African American towns where wages are half

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of what they are in Hilton Head if a job can be found at all (see Figure 4.3). For these workers who must get on a bus before 5:00 AM only to return home after 7:30 PM life is one based on constant work and commute (Heffernan et al., 2016). Life at home is restricted to eating and sleeping with little time spent with family. It is hard to imagine this workforce arrangement as anything but unsustainable.

Figure 4.3: Percentage African American by Postal Code, 2018. Source: Map by author. Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2018.

These portraits of housing and transportation problems in South Carolina are merely snapshots, but are representative of the how the problems associated with isolation, seasonality, second-home and short-term rental demands create a perfect storm of rising housing costs that make it extremely difficult for ordinary workers to live within a reasonable distance of the places where they earn their income. In this light, Long et al’s (2012) reflection on the state of these places seems particularly prescient:

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One does not have to imagine very hard to foresee communities which are filled with second homes whose owners are expecting services that there are no workers to deliver; or destinations where every piece of available land is filled with second homes priced out of the financial range of workers including teachers, public safety workers, and the middle class in general; or a destination where the workers are no longer willing to travel the distance from where they can afford to live to their place of work.

The next chapter focuses on two places that are distinct in so many ways yet are very much alike in highlighting how seasonal tourism dependent areas have come to rely so heavily on guestworkers. While one is coastal and one is mountainous both have become landscapes of privilege for some and exclusion for workers.

5 Islands in the Stream Jackson, Wyoming, and the “New West” Flying into Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is a breathtaking experience. The airport lies at the foot of the Tetons, among the most dramatic portions of the Rocky Mountain system. Jackson Hole itself is a roughly 55 mile long valley extending on either side of the Snake river from just south of Yellowstone National Park at the north to the town of Jackson itself at its southernmost point. As the airplane glides south to its landing, the entirety of the Grand Tetons is on full display. Once on the ground and exiting the aircraft into the crisp open air (the airport is too small to require jetways), the panoramic view is reminiscent of an Ansel Adams print or Bob Ross landscape. If you somehow were not aware that you were now out West, an archway of piled antlers framing the doorway to the terminal entrance would give you a pretty good idea. Leaving the airport and heading to the nearby town of Jackson, one is struck by the immense scale of the landscape and its openness, further punctuated by the speck of land represented by the tiny airport. While driving the 15 minutes to town it would be easy to get a sense that the land around you is open, ready for development: a blank slate. But you are met with a clue to the contrary as you approach Jackson, a small sign off to the left announcing that you are leaving Grand Teton National Park. Indeed, the Jackson Hole airport is actually inside Grand Teton National Park, and in fact is the only U.S. airport located inside of a national park. Were it not for this fact, one could likely envision the landscape dotted with dozens of homes along the drive to town with the most dramatic scenic view one could imagine right outside the back door. Instead the landscape remains mostly open, because this is protected land. The town of Jackson itself lies just a few miles to the south of the Grand Teton National Park boundary. Yet even as you approach, off to the east lies another vast open space devoid of development. This is the Elk National Refuge. The contrast is sharp along its fenced boundary where the town sits along its southernmost edge. To one side is open grassland pocked with various ungulates. On the other is society. But there is limited space for the human landscape. The town is completely surrounded on all sides by the steep slopes of the adjacent buttes, including the Snow King ski area that adorns the northern slope of the large hill to the south, looming over downtown Jackson. The town itself is shaped like an elongated boomerang through this tight valley, sort of shoehorned in between the hills. In many ways the town is like an island. Between national parks, national forests, federal wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management land, Native American reservations, and stateowned properties like parks and recreation areas, very little space is open to the private market. In fact, the entire western mountain region of the United States https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-005

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including the northern Rockies is largely publicly-owned. The remaining private amenity-laden spaces form a sort of discontinuous “archipelago” among the valleys where development is possible (Hines, 2012). Jackson itself is completely surrounded by federally protected land. In addition to Grand Teton National Park and the Elk Refuge to its north, it is bounded on every other side by the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The result is that any spatial growth of the town or development immediately outside its boundaries is made effectively impossible. In short, whatever demand that might exist in and around Jackson is forever met by a limit in the supply of land open for development. This problem is rather recent in Jackson’s history. The valley that would eventually come to be called Jackson Hole was long inhabited by various Native American tribes. Settlement associated with western expansion came in the middle 19th century first on a non-permanent basis by fur trappers and unsuccessful mining operations. The first permanent settlers came as homesteaders in the 1880s, incentivized by the various Homestead Acts providing them with land grants of 160 acres in exchange for a small fee. Still the official population of the valley was less than 1,500 by 1920. Most of these families were involved in cattle and sheep ranching. It was a difficult life due to the harsh climate and landscape of the valley. Operating a profitable ranch required more land than 160 acres could provide. Some enterprising ranchers were able to acquire more land or find work on the side in order to survive, but many also found that they could supplement their incomes by welcoming paying visitors who needed a stopover as they were making their way to America’s first national park, Yellowstone. Many of these guests enjoyed staying and experiencing life on a working ranch. This eventually morphed into the iconic dude ranch phenomenon that was thriving by the 1920s. Easterners seeking a romanticized experience of the old western frontier could come and help raise the cattle which at this point were mainly being kept in order to serve as the main attraction of the tourists. This new form of tourism created a valuable means of diversifying income to supplement what had been a precarious industry at least until the Great Depression. What we have come to think of as a more typical form of tourism began to emerge from these beginnings. It received a boost from railroad companies such as the Northern Pacific Railway, that, sensing the potential benefits of a burgeoning tourism industry, served to both promote the development of national parks through financing and advertisement as well as to build rail lines to physically connect them (Argust, 2017). Further tourism development came with the creation of Grand Teton National Park in 1929 and from the economic and social transformations that came in the wake of the Second World War. The expansion of the interstate system in the 1950s and the dominance of the automobile allowed more Americans the ability to travel more quickly to more diverse locations than ever before. For Jackson, this was especially true with the advent of new snow removal techniques that allowed the roads to stay open all winter, as the town had previously remained isolated during the brutal cold months

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(Pumphrey, 2009). It was in this era that skiing also became a viable recreational industry and the first motels began to emerge, some of which can still be seen in Jackson today (A Brief History of Jackson Hole, 2016). The dawn of tourism was nothing short of transformational. The process of shifting from an agricultural and extractive past towards an economy based on recreation and leisure was one that forced many mountain communities to come to terms with the limited possibilities associated with the former and accept the latter, warts and all, as Pumphrey (2009) describes: As extractive industry, farming, and ranching declined in the West, many towns struggled to maintain population and economic momentum. They faced a choice: to embrace the potential economic benefits and cultural threats of tourism, or suffer economic decline and possible failure. Termed a ‘devil’s bargain’ by historian Hal Rothman, this strategy was not guaranteed ‘to meet the expectations of communities that embrace it as an economic strategy.’ But it ably demonstrated the adaptive tendency of western settlers, who attempted to compensate for the ‘scarcity’ of resources and unproductive agriculture with the perceived economic ‘abundance’ of large-scale tourism. (Pumphrey, 2009, p. 16)

Tourism has undeniable benefits that isolated places like Jackson have been able to fully realize. If other economic sectors had struggled in the past due to the limitations of the environment, tourism is able to thrive in what is otherwise an inhospitable landscape. The ruggedness of the region is the very draw that has made it so enticing ever since the “dudes” arrived to play out their cowboy fantasies. Today the pattern remains as Jackson draws tourists from around the country in a massive seasonal migration that brings over 2.5 million visitors to the valley each year, mostly in the summer and winter months (Fact Sheet | Visit Jackson Hole, n.d.). But as tourism scholars have long noted, tourism has drawbacks, including ones that are especially acute in Jackson Hole. The town of Jackson has a resident population of just under 10,000 on a limited spatial footprint. There is simply no ability to serve such a strong demand throughout the year without importing additional labor, and because of limitations on the ability of the town to expand, housing is at a premium even before swarms of seasonal workers arrive that need to find a place to stay. The crux of the issue is that the town of Jackson is mired in a perpetual housing crisis, a problem exacerbated by the fact that Jackson has also become a second home mecca of sorts to the country’s elite. The dramatic transformation of the mountain archipelago has led scholars over the past few decades to reconceptualize the region as a sort of “New West” wherein a new socio-economic space has emerged as a site of cultural and political contestation (Hines, 2012; Robbins et al., 2009). A major factor in this change has been a dramatic demographic shift that has seen much of the south and west experiencing population growth due to internal migration within the United States. The influx of new residents has created obvious increased demand that has manifested in significant urban sprawl found around cities like Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada. With limited space to physically expand in the mountain archipelago towns,

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there instead has been a steady process of what is perhaps best described as rural gentrification. Places like Aspen and Boulder, Colorado, and Park City, Utah, provide a few well-known examples of this type of heavily gentrified mountain town. Much as inner cities throughout the United States have experienced renewed investment from wealthy and upper middle class citizens choosing to move and restore historic properties or convert former industrial spaces to upscale housing, rural mountain towns have seen similar processes as wealthy ex-urbanites have arrived to live and enjoy the abundant natural amenities. In many ways this has been made possible by the dramatic advancements in communication technologies. In the 1990s this new class of people who could participate in the service economy while enjoying the physical beauty of the mountains were dubbed “modem cowboys” (Daniels & Lapping, 1996, p. 287). Today in the era of even more footloose telecommunication, the impacts of the digital revolution on places like Jackson is undeniable. In a sense, while the town is physically isolated it is more connected than ever before culturally, socially, and economically. The motivations of what Hines (2010) has dubbed the “Post-industrial Middle Class” are the same as those who seek the experiences of place as tourists. They may be in a beautiful mountain valley with the principal goal of experiencing all that the local landscape can provide for an outdoor lifestyle, but the difference is that many are here to stay. The consequences of this type of rural gentrification are profound. It is chiefly responsible for transforming these spaces into playscapes that primarily benefit the wealthy to the exclusion of others. Hines, in writing about the transformation of his own town in Park County, Montana, describes this as a sort of self-fulfilling desire that serves to produce spaces of consumption: Thus, the ‘consumers’ of the gentrified landscape of Park County are also the ‘producers’ of the same. Therefore, we can describe gentrification, at least in the context where I work, as producing what it seeks to consume, ie the displacement of industrial working/middle-class people and the creation of a postindustrial landscape of experience. (Hines, 2010, p. 515)

It is this displacement of working people that makes the case of Jackson emblematic of the kinds of socio-economic processes that create the conditions whereby local places have found the need to insource its labor.

The Housing Crisis Tourism scholars have often written of the negative impacts that tourism has wrought in places where it has come to characterize the local economy. While places like Jackson may not experience the same level of seediness that has come to characterize so many other tourism enclaves across the United States, some of the impacts are similar. On one hand the competition for space in many ways squeezes out the lowest common denominator type of tourist traps that are endemic elsewhere, but it also

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creates a difficulty for everyday workers to access space to simply live in the places where they work. In some ways it functions as a sort of feedback loop in which the intense competition for land keeps its exclusive character intact without succumbing to the typical descent into kitsch and cheap thrills. This exclusivity in turn creates a continual draw of wealthy individuals who value the emphasis on small scale development and a palpable rural yet upscale feel, which maintains and even ratchets up the intense competition for space. Much as the Grand Tetons stands out on the physical landscape, Jackson’s wealth stands out dramatically in the economic landscape of the United States. While rich people can be found in particular clusters around the country, Teton County, of which Jackson is the government seat and houses just under half of the county’s population, is the pinnacle. Out of all 3,133 counties in the United States, Teton is by far the wealthiest with a per capita income of slightly over $250,000 in 2018. The next closest is New York County with $194,000. Perhaps even more dramatic is how this income is earned. Just under $60,000 was earned from wages; the remaining $190,000 came from investments (Schechter, 2020). Even more pronounced is the gap between the average income of the top 1% of incomes in the county where again New York comes in second, but the gap is $20 million with Teton county at just over $28 million and New York $8 million respectively (Elkins, 2017). It is notable that the average wage income is high as well, in the top 25 counties in the country, but the fact remains that the gap between income earned in wages and income earned as investments is nowhere greater. Stuart, a longtime resident of Jackson, who had recently retired from his career in management at a local ski resort echoed this sentiment with an analogy based upon his personal experience: You might have heard it already, but as far as the inequality divide in wages and wealth, this is probably the epicenter of the whole world between the haves and the have nots, and it’s because of all the wealthy people. And what I tell a lot of people, and I think it’s fairly true is, is what Aspen is to the Hollywood set and the people, that we are to Wall Street.

The small size of the population helps to account for the dramatic disparity, yet even so, it is clear that Jackson has become an oasis for the country’s elite, particularly from the east coast. All of this has major consequences for the land and housing markets in and around Jackson. One indication of this is found in simply driving around to survey the architecture of the town. While the oldest buildings around town square have been preserved to showcase their western character, the houses in residential areas often built in the later part of the 20th century experience consistent turnover. In essence, many of these older homes with 1970s era aesthetics are simply not nearly as valuable as the land on which they sit. As soon as an older property is sold, it is likely to be razed in order to make space to build a more contemporary dwelling. It is very common to see demolition crews involved in “scraping” a property, or new construction in the middle of a long-established neighborhood (see Figure 5.1).

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A brief visit to any real estate websites reveals the high cost of land in and around town. While prices vary depending on particular properties, it would be very rare to find something below $500,000, and very commonly will top one million, simply for the land.

Figure 5.1: Jackson Wyoming Homes, Old and New. Source: Photo by authjor. In Jackson, Wyoming, any older homes for sale such as the one pictured at left will almost certainly be demolished and replaced with a new home featuring a more contemporary style. With such limited space to build in Wyoming, the value of land has skyrocketed over the past few decades as second homes are purchased by wealthy people who live elsewhere. The land is now much more valuable than older structures that sit upon it.

The story of Jackson’s gentrification and the associated erosion of the local workforce is written into its history of real estate values. In the mid-1980s the median sales price in town was roughly $90,000, which almost exactly matched the affordable housing price for a median income household at the time. It was the last time that could be said. By 2000 the median sales price had risen to $565,000, then triple the affordable housing price. In 2016 it had increased to $1.13 million which was four times the affordable housing price (Affordable Workforce Housing Standards, 2018). Only five years later in 2021, the median sales price now stands at $2.75 million (Robinson-Johnson, 2021)! With the median family income now at $115,000 a home needs to be $450,000 or less, something that simply does not exist at current market rates (JHCHT, 2020). It is a gross understatement to suggest that living in Jackson is not affordable for the average middle class salaried worker, let alone a wage worker in the service industry. Yet, there are chain clothing stores, groceries, restaurants, and all manner of services found within town. But how do these people afford to work and live here? The short answer is that many do not. They may work here, but they live elsewhere. The simple fact is that since 2000, supply of local housing has not risen at the same rate (1.8%) as job growth (2.1%). Over time, the end result is that as housing

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affordability has not kept up, a larger share of the local workforce has been forced to commute. Since the 1980s when 91% of the workforce resided in Jackson, the share of the workforce living locally had slowly fallen to 58% by 2015 (Affordable Workforce Housing Standards, 2018). So where are the other 42% living? A small selection of towns serve Jackson as bedroom communities. The closest are in Idaho, just over the Teton Pass about 45 minutes away. Victor and Driggs are two towns in particular that house a great many commuting workers who need to find an available place that is somewhat affordable. A housing advocate working with the local immigrant population, named Tatiana, spoke of people increasingly seeking the commuting option, but that it comes at a cost: It’s a hard commute and the rents are getting more expensive there as well. People tend to want to move over to Victor, but Idaho has some of the worst schools in the country. So you give up a lot. Jackson has great resources. Jackson has really good schools, so you have people who are really in need of that support, people of low income who need the good schools are going to give that up to go to a place with crappy schools.

A grocery store manager at Albertsons, one of the two major chains in Jackson, described an even more extreme commute, saying it is not uncommon to find some of their workers driving from as far away as Idaho Falls, almost two hours away. Aside from distance, the trip from Idaho is also precarious in the winter as road closures are common during snowstorms in the Teton Pass. This can be incredibly problematic for businesses who will go without enough staff during such an event. Albertsons has even taken the step of providing several beds on site to stranded employees. It is even more precarious for workers who cannot get home to their children who might be stuck at daycare or school when the pass closes during working hours. That some people even consider such commutes for a low-end job reveals a significant mismatch between job availability and housing availability in the mountain archipelago of the American West. All of this means it is close to impossible for some seasonal tourism workers to find adequate housing during the peak. As a result, some summer workers have taken to living at the Curtis Canyon Campsite well outside of town on the other side of the Elk reserve in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. One local resident described it as a sort of temporary shantytown: Yeah, shantytown. I have a couple of friends that lived up there this summer. And then also just like living in your car, RV, or van life, you get a van and you outfit it and you make it work. And the rec center is super affordable. So you can get access to the shower and laundry and then park wherever you can. Where in the winter, you can’t when it’s freezing, but parking is very limited in the winter, which is another factor.

In 2021 it is estimated that 300–500 people were living in the national forest for the season, often overstaying their 5 or 14 day campsite allowance (Koshmrl, 2021). The tradition of inhabiting the park for the summer has become a normal feature of the

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Jackson Hole peak season and serves as something of a release valve on the housing pressures in town. The shortage of affordable housing is clearly a major element in the public consciousness. On the day I arrived in Jackson, the local paper, the Jackson Hole News & Guide was running no fewer than four separate stories regarding this ongoing crisis. According to Tatiana, whose organization has been included in community stakeholder discussions about the housing shortage, “It is the primary concern of business. It’s obviously the primary concern of people living here. The businesspeople can’t hire people to run their businesses.” She continued by describing how the worsening housing crisis has pushed the different stakeholder groups who had sometimes been at odds with one another about planning issues in the town to actually begin working together on collective solutions. In particular, it was clear that businesses that cater to tourists during the peak had been dealing with acute worker shortages due to a lack of housing: We don’t have any choice at this point. If we continue the way we are we are losing members of our community. Businesses are really struggling. I think for the first time businesses are starting to see an impact to their bottom lines. The last few tourist seasons were the first time we’ve seen backlash from tourists waiting in line. You have restaurants that can’t seat their whole restaurant, and people waiting see that yet there is part of the restaurant closed because they don’t have enough servers? That doesn’t work.

The workforce housing shortage has led some employers in service industries to drastic measures that would be unthinkable in most other places in the United States. Some larger businesses with more resources have found the need to become landlords in order to secure housing for their workers in town. Aside from the emergency beds that Albertsons provides to snowbound employees, it also purchased apartments two blocks from the store to provide to workers. At least some of these are leased to J-1 students. They are not the only employers in town that have found the need to supply housing to their workers if they hope to stay fully staffed throughout the year, including the hospital and the largest tourism operation, the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. While these efforts do keep some housing set aside for workforces, they do so in a housing market that is highly constrained, that must at times feel like a zerosum game with new housing opening up at a snail’s pace. Such is the case in a place where demand for properties is extremely high, but the available supply is extremely limited by available space. It is for this reason that there are several organizations both public and private that are working within these constraints to make affordable housing more widely available to the community. Among these is the well-known home building non-profit organization, Habitat for Humanity. As someone who had volunteered to help build several Habitat homes in my time, it was hard not to find Habitat for Humanity of the Greater Teton Area as something of an oddity. Unlike in most parts of the country where Habitat

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homes are built for a distinctly disadvantaged population, in Jackson, they are built for people working in middle-class jobs. Betsy, who was working as a community engagement manager for Habitat in Jackson at the time, alluded to the cognitive dissonance when one sees who is applying for a home, including the several that were currently under construction “And our typical applicants are people with very normal jobs, librarians, teachers, construction workers, we have going to these homes three bankers, tellers, loan operators. And just things that you wouldn’t . . . you wouldn’t think Habitat.” But eligibility for home ownership through Habitat for Humanity is based on one’s income in a given area, and applicants must have incomes between 30% and 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI). In the case of Jackson, for a household of four, that is $57,800 at 50% AMI and just under $80,000 at 80% AMI (Habitat, 2021). I will admit to a bit of a sobering feeling upon seeing the numbers and realizing that I would have been eligible based on my university salary. But the real irony was Betsy herself could easily qualify for the very homes she was helping to build through Habitat, and has been constantly shuffling between different apartments since she moved to the area: I rent right now, I just, I’ve been here for two years and not necessary after two years. You can get into the housing authorities or like lottery which I will be entering it in February so kind of like renting I’ve moved several times. I’m currently living in Driggs Idaho, so I commute. So I’m a commuter, at this point in time for the winter, I was in Jackson all summer. Lost my summer housing and then back over to Driggs.

She is not the only Habitat for Humanity employee in the same situation. The one silver lining is that she is able to share the commute with a couple of other people. For those who do manage to be selected by Habitat, the move to something affordable and located in town is transformative. Betsy described how one of the recently selected families would be improving their living situation: So for example, one of our home owners now . . . they’re living in a two-bedroom for $1700 a month, with two children and they’re gonna be moving in after we finish these homes and they complete their agreement of sweat equity into a three bedroom for $850. The husband of that family who works four jobs and Katie works one and then takes care of the kids. So it’s just like what people put in, trying to live here is crazy, It’s just, it’s unbelievable, and I think the rest of the country doesn’t realize that, and I think a lot of people who call us their home, also don’t realize that.

Habitat for Humanity is not the only non-profit organization that is building housing in Jackson. In 1991, The Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust began to secure properties as its founders began to see the erosion of home affordability and forecast a future where local workers would be forced out of their own community. Since that time, they have built or acquired many homes and now manages 181 with an aim to keep them perpetually affordable and in the hands of residents working locally. The overall profile of the typical worker that lives in one of these properties is diverse

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although the single biggest working group are those in tourism and hospitality representing just over 25% of the total (JHCHT, 2020). These residences are available both for sale or rent. In short, it functions both as a landlord as well as a housing developer that directly contracts builders for its construction projects. All of the properties are restricted to those who work locally in the community and have incomes below a threshold of 120% of the area median income. In 2021 this was $138,720. Total assets are also capped at $277,400 to ensure individuals who hold a great deal of wealth but only show a current lower salary cannot take advantage of the system. Applicants are also weighted by type of job (educators, healthcare workers and first responders get most points), length of time on the waiting list, length of time living in town, and even community service hours worked. Residency and income requirements are checked annually to ensure compliance and residents can be evicted if they fail to meet the requirements. The mechanism to ensure perpetual affordability for a property is a bit more involved considering they are transferred in the marketplace. This is accomplished by the use of deed restrictions that follow the property regardless of owner. Any new owner can only purchase an affordable property by agreeing to the deed restriction that grants the Trust the right to buy back the property with only modest appreciation. It can then be sold to the next qualifying applicant who then also agrees to the deed restriction. This process effectively takes the home out of the free market where, as one of the Trust’s board members succinctly describes, “limitless capital meets limited supply” (JHCHT, 2020, p. 13). During my visit, a series of new apartments consisting of 28 units were under construction in a partnership between the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust, the Town of Jackson and the Jackson/Teton County Housing Department. Now known as the Redmond Street rentals, the buildings have been constructed in an updated style matching the modern Western character of the town. The construction build is high quality and attractive in a way that belies the fact that these have been reserved for affordability (see Figure 5.2). The partnership represents a new level of cooperation that had not been previously shared between the Housing Department and the Housing Trust. According to the Housing Department director April Norton who was hired in 2016 to lead a newly reformed department, in the years prior to her arrival the two housing organizations as well as other stakeholders had mostly worked in isolation: It wasn’t a joint Housing Authority. It was just the Teton County housing authority. It was sort of its own entity, in many ways. And what they said is, ‘We wanna bring that in-house. We want it to be joint. We need to be looking at this as a town and county together and we need a clearing house.’ Because what they were seeing, is you had the Housing Authority coming to the town and county asking for money. You had the Housing Trust coming to the town and county asking for money, you’d have that community coming in and asking for money and sometimes, developers, themselves coming in and saying . . . And they are also saying, ‘We need this money, because . . .’ And they’re fighting for the money. And it was a very competitive sort of . . . Instead of, ‘Let’s all work together because this is a huge rock we’re all trying

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to push up a really steep hill,’ it was, ‘We’re all gonna . . . We’ll circle our own wagons. We’re gonna be very siloed and we’re kind of afraid each other.’ And it’s been interesting sort of stepping into my role and seeing there’s some of that . . . Certainly there’s . . . That’s still there. But I think as this plays out, we’ll see hopefully that that will change . . . Will continue to change. I think we’re in a much better trajectory now in terms of being able to work together.

The Redmond Street rentals showed a new level of cooperation that had not previously been displayed. In this case, the Housing Department is the majority owner with 65% equity in the property. The Housing Trust was given the task of developing the project and managing the existing rentals, similar to how a property management company runs the day-to-day operations of maintenance and screening new renters for a homeowner who would rather pay someone else to do it. April described that in working together, each organization is able to teach the other some lessons in management from a perspective that they had not yet encountered. In working with the Housing Trust, the Housing Department is able to focus its energies on what it does well and allow the Trust to do likewise: Yeah, and hopefully as we move forward we’re able to actually work together. Because we aren’t developing. We’re sort of the gatekeepers of the public funds, though. We’re the gatekeepers of public funds and so one of the reasons I assume they hired me, is because I worked for a private foundation for years before I came here and was a gatekeeper of private dollars, but was . . . A lot of the work that I do is not dissimilar from grantmaking. A lot of the decisions you have to make when you’re choosing between potential grantees, and what are the expectations.

Following the success of the Redmond Street rental project, the partnership with the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust is continuing with a new major project to build 24 new units in the heart of downtown, on land granted by the town, and both providing funding. A third project is in the development stage with a location to be determined. It is in this vein that the Housing Department continues to develop properties with multiple private partners, including Habitat for Humanity. The latest Habitat for Humanity project concluded in 2021, and a new one is set to commence. Each of these projects, of which several more are in the process of development over the next five years, is targeted to house workers at various income levels. Low Income Housing Tax Credits, funds made available by the federal government to encourage private investors to partner with local housing authorities, are also being sought and if granted will provide another development targeted specifically for lower income workers (JTAHD, 2020). Once built, or if it can acquire already existing properties, the Housing Department plays an ongoing role, not only of land owner, but also of ensuring compliance. One of the important steps that April helped to implement upon stepping into the role as director was to hire a full-time compliance coordinator to ensure that anyone living in a deed-restricted property is actually in compliance with the agreement. The result over the past several years is that non-compliance has mostly been

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eradicated. This has helped in restoring some confidence in the community that the housing authorities are doing what they are supposed to be doing and that people who could otherwise afford market-rate housing are not taking advantage. Many of the properties that the Housing Department now oversees that are deed-restricted were created by another important process that has been developed by the town as a means of ensuring that any new growth will be met with workforce housing mitigation. In particular, the Land Development Plan approved by the town of Jackson sets out regulations that any new development that generates new workers must be met with a proportional creation of housing. Just how much new workforce housing is required is based on complicated calculations that vary by the type of use being proposed and are the function of the size of the proposal. For example, new office space would generate the need for more housing mitigation than retail space. Restaurant/bar space requires the most mitigation by more the double that of office space which is the second largest. A rough estimate is that adding 2000 square feet of restaurant or bar space requires a little over one housing unit worth of mitigation. The more space created, the more housing that must be built to compensate. It is through this mechanism that some apartments in new housing developments are deed restricted along with the majority that are sold or rented at market rates. One visible example of this type of mitigation is provided at the other major grocery store Smiths. Here above the attached liquor store is a set of several apartments that the grocery provides for rent to its year-round employees (see Figure 5.3). The setting for these apartments appears rather odd, but it suits the purpose and directives established in the regulations.

Figure 5.2: Redmond Street Rentals. Source: Photo by author. These homes were built through a partnership between the Town of Jackson, the Jackson/Teton Affordable Housing Department and the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust. They were built specifically to provide affordable workforce housing and remain deed- restricted to only be rented to residents who are actively working in and around the town.

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Figure 5.3: Grocery Store Employee Housing. Source: Photo by author. The apartments found atop the liquor store section of one of the two grocery stores in Jackson, Wyoming, Smiths provides housing for around 40 employees. This housing was built in part to satisfy regulations that any expansion of a business must be met with the building of workforce housing to compensate for added demand in the local market brought by economic growth.

Ultimately, these are just several of the efforts that Teton County and the Town of Jackson are involved with to deal with their housing problems. There are other regulations as well, such as a ban on short-term rental properties in most areas of Jackson. The purpose of such a ban is to ensure that people do not convert their existing properties into AirBnB or VRBO style rentals that would seriously threaten an already precarious housing situation. In those areas where short-term rentals are allowed, home owners must apply for a permit to be able to utilize it that way. Other potential avenues of mitigation are in the conversation, such as allowing some properties to build a fourth story in particular areas of town. Currently there is a maximum of three stories in most areas of town, in keeping with the character of the town where you rarely see more than two stories. But they are proposals that seem to warrant consideration; if one concedes that horizontal development is constrained by the local geography, then vertical development is one avenue that is open, despite being unpopular for now. The hard fight to create affordable workforce housing is a constant uphill battle that seems unwinnable at the moment. This feeling seems to have helped some people to develop rather stoic attitudes about current situation. This was evident in speaking with one of the town planners when talking about the fact that all of the town’s housing efforts are aimed at full-time residents rather than seasonal workers like J-1s or H-2Bs: There is that dynamic of the competition between the seasonals and the full time employees. And the reality is the magnitude of the housing issue is just huge. It’s not a problem you solve. It’s an issue to address and do our best. And do what we can and continue to work on, but

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we’re never going to solve it. Inherently, the reason it’s an issue is we have a fundamentally broken market, and we’re not going to fix that. We have a demand that’s at least national if not global, a supply that’s not only geographically limited, but limited by policy as well. And we’re not going to start building 20 story buildings, 40 story buildings to solve the demand problem.

Ultimately, he is correct, at least for the foreseeable future. Notwithstanding the Herculean efforts of the members of the local community to address the workforce housing crisis in Jackson, they size of the task is impossibly large. While every new affordable housing unit that is added through the multipronged efforts of the town does serve to help keep at least some of the community members in the community, it is with the realization that it is a mere fraction of total number of homes that are subjected to the whims of the free market and the inflationary pressures of unlimited global capital investment. Jackson is in many ways a unique place. Its isolation, majestic views, legacy of settlement and industrial change, and relative location near major national parks make it a singular, and therefore highly desirable. It would seem that the factors that have led the town to be so reliant on guestworkers would be unique to themselves. But in many ways it is has a good deal of company across the United States, even in places that are significantly wetter.

Cape Cod Considering how much it immediately evokes tourism, it is somewhat surprising to learn that compared to many other places in New England, Cape Cod began to evolve as tourism destination rather late in its history. Today it is probably best known as a summer retreat for thousands of Americans who flock to the peninsula and its surrounding islands to spend time in the warmer climate of the Cape in the many cottages that dot the landscape. Cape Cod evokes an unmistakable sense of place. This is not in any way a location carved out by the proverbial tourism “cookie cutter.” Driving along the 6A out onto the peninsula the weight of history is palpable, even without stopping first to see the highly overrated Plymouth Rock memorial. The place just feels old, lived in. The houses themselves seem as if they have been around forever, and many are indeed extremely old by U.S. standards. New England salt box style houses and those that gave name to the “Cape Cod” construction style are ubiquitous. These practical old homes and their standard lush English gardens make it difficult to suppress feelings of envy at being fortunate to live here instead of the soulless vinyl village found upon return home. While the cultural landscape represents a large share of the region’s appeal, the physical landscape and climate also play a vital role. On a map the Cape’s outline fittingly resembles a fishhook, a coincidence that feels almost too perfect considering the legacy of the fishing industry. On the other hand, it could also be seen as a person flexing their bicep muscle, and if only the

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northernmost portion of the peninsula that wraps back westward would instead go eastward, one could imagine it evoking the stereotypical muscleman beach denizen proclaiming “the beach is that way” as he aims to impress with his bulging arm. Another allusion to a different iconic industry of the region. Coupled with this rather unusual peninsular shape, the physical landscape of the Cape and its southern lying islands Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard provide a singular look and feel. Geologically, the Cape and its islands were created during the last ice age as the Laurentide Ice Sheet reached its furthest extent between 23,000 and 18,000 years ago. Here before they fully retreated, the glaciers continued to deposit glacial till to create the terminal moraines that left a sort of spine to the western portion of the Cape and the islands. As the glaciers melted, they also released a great deal of water that formed outwash plains further depositing soil to create lower lying areas of the Eastern and Southern portions of the Cape. Occasionally large boulders and chunks of ice were also left behind, the latter to be covered by sediment and melt slowly to form the indentations of the many kettle lakes that now dot the landscape. These areas provide ample flat space for agriculture but with the caveat that the sandy soils heavily leach water and nutrients. Finally, thousands of years of erosion and deposition along the coasts eventually led to the development of sand dunes on the Northern side along Cape Cod Bay and the entire northwesternmost “fist” where the fishing port Provincetown is now located (Oldale, n.d.). It was in the creation of the bay to the west and the protection that this arm afforded that would indelibly change the trajectory of the region by providing a sheltered respite to a group of people who might otherwise have continued down to Virginia in 1620. During the 5000 years prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, Cape Cod had been inhabited by Native Americans tribes of the loose Wampanoag confederation. This included groups like the Nauset and Mashpee, who occupied portions of the Cape. Others in the confederation controlled the territory of what would become the rough boundaries of Plymouth Colony in what would become the Southeastern portion of Massachusetts. The Wampanoag groups were a mostly sedentary people engaged in farming, but because the soils of the Cape were relatively poor, farming, hunting, and fishing were important supplements to their diets, something Europeans would learn shortly (McKenzie, 2011). While they had grown to a fairly sizeable population by the 1600s, the century would ultimately not be kind to them. Europeans had begun to increasingly explore the area by the 16th century. Prior to this time, the Vikings (temporarily) and Basque fishing expeditions had already established a presence along North American coasts to the north of Cape Cod. After the Jamestown Colony became the first permanent English settlement in North America, in Virginia, other migrants were soon to follow often interacting with the local indigenous people (sometimes violently). The most notable of these were the puritans sailing in the famous Mayflower who upon leaving Plymouth, England found their way to the northernmost portion of the Cape in 1620. While they were attempting to travel to Virginia, the strong winter currents prevented them from sailing south and

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thus they put into the bay in what is now the area around Provincetown. With the famous Mayflower Compact, they ultimately decided to stay before moving further west to eventually arrive and establish what was soon to be called Plymouth Colony. During this time, they found some local inhabitants, but they also found empty villages and abandoned fields. For the three years prior to their arrival, the indigenous people in the area had seen the population devastated by an epidemic of some form of European disease that preceded the arrival of the Mayflower. While the source and type of illness are debated to this day, it is fairly undisputable that the English who did arrive benefitted from a landscape that was now open to them and from a group of people weakened in their ability to repulse outsiders (Marr & Cathey, 2010). While the early going may have been rough for these new settlers, they were here to stay (with the assistance of some locals like the Nauset) and eventually grew to encompass all of the former Wampanoag territory stretching from the mainland all the way up the peninsula and to the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Towns on Cape Cod like Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth all started to emerge over several decades, further supplanting the native population that continued to decline. The landscape began to transform as the old Native American trails became Pilgrim trails now with connecting European settlements. Thus, when one drives along the 6A today, they are moving along what was home to indigenous foot traffic over 400 years ago. Over the next couple centuries as the now permanent European population continued to grow, they came to fully understand the constraints of their environment on the Cape. Further exploitation of the soils revealed their great limitations and the direct need to continually fish the inshore waters surrounding the Cape as well as those further offshore on the Georges Bank to supply food, fertilizer, and exports. As a result, the livelihoods that emerged typically revolved around the surrounding ocean. A fairly sizeable maritime trade and ship building industry could be found in various ports. Cape Cod ships running up and down the coast as far as the West Indies supplied the plantation economies southward with lumber, salt, fish, and other products of New England then heavily in demand. Another iconic industry also emerged that would serve to connect the region to the rest of the world: whaling. Initially limited to harvesting and processing the remains of dead whales washed up on the beach, quickly Cape Codders learned to actively hunt slow moving right whales wading close to shore from small boats. Cape Cod Bay in particular was full of whales that were easily killed and converted to oil, bone and baleen products. This practice spread to Nantucket by 1691 where it was to become the most important industry for a century and a half. When a Nantucket whaler was mistakenly blown out to sea and came upon a pod of sperm whales, he managed to capture one and in doing so jump started the offshore whaling industry. Sperm whales, while difficult to catch, were much more valuable due to the great amount of sweet-smelling spermaceti, used to produce superior candles, found in their massive blocky heads. From this point on, Nantucket became the world’s leading whaling

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center and in short order it was oil from here that illuminated the streets of London and served literally to lubricate the machinery of the industrial revolution. And for a relatively short time, it made many families on Nantucket island extremely wealthy (Massachusetts Historical Commission, 1986; Schneider, 2000). Life on Cape Cod, while harsh at times, was survivable, but popular perceptions of the place as one requiring extra toil for little reward served to undermine outside investment. This may not have been an entirely bad thing as Mackenzie (2011) argues. For one, with few people interested in relocating to Cape Cod, it did not suffer from population pressures and the people were better able to learn to appreciate and manage the resources that were vital to their future successes. In time the fish that had sustained them and had been conserved eventually became an engine for expanded commerce. By the 1800s, people did discover how to make a significant profit from Cape Cod, by utilizing the inshore waters to create a thriving bait fishery that could supply the cod fleets that were sailing from around the entire region’s other ports. Preservation of some of these fish for export was also necessary and by 1830 over 40 saltworks were sprinkled around the Cape for this purpose (J. C. O’Connell, 2002). Inshore fishing, while lucrative for some, was also heavily taxing on the local waters and troubling for the less capitalized pole fishers who could not compete. Utilizing weirs to harvest as many small fish as possible with few limits eventually left the local waters depleted of fish and of local livelihoods. Inshore whaling also did not last very long as the right whale was soon mostly hunted out of the local waters. As a result, whalers continually sailed farther and farther south in the Atlantic throughout the later 18th century, exhausting the supply of whales as they went. Eventually, ships went around Cape Horn, and the whaling industry, while centered on Nantucket, relied on ships making multi-year voyages to the Pacific where sperm whales were still abundant (Massachusetts Historical Commission, 1986). But here, Nantucket and the Cape whalers were victims of their own successes. These longer voyages required larger ships that the smaller ports of the region could not accommodate safely or efficiently due to the famously treacherous shoaling in and around the Cape. Nantucket’s shoal at the mouth of the harbor was only about six feet deep. Larger ships often had to wait for high tide to enter or needed to resort to the difficult and expensive step of loading and unloading cargo with smaller ships beyond the bar. This was a major contributing factor to the decline of whaling in Nantucket by the middle of the 19th century as the industry shifted to the mainland. New Bedford, Massachusetts, with its deep water port offered access to the now expanding railroads that would serve western expansion and quickly took its place as the whaling capital of the world while the industry still lasted. By 1874 there were no longer any whaling vessels sailing from Nantucket (Schneider, 2000). But even as fishing and whaling began to decline, the 19th century also saw the development of light manufacturing as well as an iconic form of agriculture. Local factories emerged producing everything from glass and textiles to guano for fertilizer.

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But perhaps Cape Cod’s most iconic crop emerged in 1816 when a local farmer decided to cultivate cranberries in a nearby bog. In short order, Barnstable county became the country’s leading cranberry producer and kept that position for a century with cultivation on over 1000 acres of bogland on the Cape (Alexander, 1953). Still, Cape Cod at this point was largely rustic, and the very reason that famous hiker and naturalist Henry David Thoreau came to visit and write about his long walks across the peninsula. Even in the 1850s, Thoreau realized that the uncluttered, austere character of the land was special and would eventually draw those who would seek to bask in the salty sea air. “The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them” (Thoreau, 1908, p. 318). Thoreau was both right and wrong. While he felt that the elite in society ensconced in their mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, less than 70 miles away might not desire to break away from their worldly indulgences, the sheer beauty of the landscape was undeniable and would not be a secret forever. In time the elite would indeed come, and boy did they ever come. The transformation from what it was to the Cape Cod of today, abounding in tourists rather than fish, began to emerge in the decades after Thoreau wrote about his travels there in the mid-19th century. Throughout this period, Methodist camp revivals became a common sight in the summer. Thousands of pious attendants would make the trek out onto the cape to spend their week praying and sleeping in tents next to the seashore. Over the decades these Christian camps became more formalized and eventually tents were replaced with small cottages as some of the meeting associations also brought beachfront properties to provide a set aside space for recreation to go along with their praying. Naturally, these worshippers not only returned with news of their spiritual pursuits as well as the leisure they experienced. While new people were beginning to discover Cape Cod, those who lived there were starting to get out. After the Civil War, the marine catch had begun to plummet, salt was no longer profitable to produce locally and as a result, the population of the Cape began to decline; from just under 36,000 in 1860 to under 27,000 by 1920 (J. C. O’Connell, 2002). The decline of these traditional extractive industries set the stage for the development of a new industry that would rise like a Phoenix from their ashes. Cape Cod was still full of natural beauty and its people would be eager to welcome a means of income from the outsiders who were beginning to arrive in increasing numbers. As Cape fish stocks declined, and as fishing families fled, a new group of people came to Cape Cod to make it their own. After 1880, writers, authors, and painters, catering to a growing population of middle-class urban residents seeking escape from industrial cities, began to call attention to Cape Cod as a place where weary industrial man could reconnect with a pristine and powerful nature. Yet to accomplish this feat, those producing new visions of the Cape faced the

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ironic necessity of recasting Cape Cod’s fishing past, its industrial fishing present, and the social consequences of ecological decline in ways that would appeal to tourists and vacationers looking to escape from their own problems in urban communities. How writers, artists, and tourist promoters met this challenge by the 1890 s added one more chapter to this story of removals, but one with ominous and long-lasting consequences. (McKenzie, 2011, p. 138)

The railroad that had served the export industries of the Cape was now becoming a means of bringing vacationers, religious or otherwise. Trains provided a relatively quick means of travel for the middle class vacationers who started to arrive from large population centers like Boston which was only a few hours away. Naturally, services began to emerge to cater to their needs. Rather late for the region, the first major resort hotel was only built in 1860. Others soon followed as the railroad line was extended all the way all the way around the Cape to Provincetown and with a branch line running to the easternmost point at Chatham (J. C. O’Connell, 2002). While some were rather large Victorian style hotel resorts, most were smaller, run by sole proprietors, and were subject to constant precarity due to poor construction, a short tourism season, and the fickle nature of tourism demand. Many that were built in late 19th and early 20th century struggled until automobiles became the predominate mode of travel (Weiss, 2004). Until that time, the insular nature of resort development did not allow for tourists to explore the Cape freely, and “all inclusive” type packages kept vacationers tethered to their hotels with room and meals all provided for in the cost of the stay. The lack of personal transport and the resort structure ensured that profits would be clustered to the areas immediately within resort villages, and as a result Cape Cod overall remained economically depressed (J. C. O’Connell, 2002). The final transformation of the Cape away from most other forms of industry toward one predominately focused on tourism happened with the advent of the automobile. Cars, with their ability to allow people to take shorter vacations, with more variety of stops and the ability to explore, set off the tourism boom once and for all. It also changed the character of where people decided to stay. With more freedom to move about, the large Victorian resort hotels declined and gave way to the era of small roadside motels, and to an even greater extent, cottages for rent. With the rising number of tourists, Cape Codders began to realize the attraction that their historical landscape represented: Year-round inhabitants themselves soon realized that among the area’s greatest assets were the quaint charm of its villages, with their salt box homes, and the seafaring atmosphere which had belonged to Cape Cod for over three centuries. Lighthouses, harbors, and fishing piers are ideal tourist attractions and many old houses and buildings were repainted and landscaped to catch the tourist’s eye. Museums, antique barns, and gift shops sprang up; soon summer theaters and art studios were also being developed. (Alexander, 1953, p. 323)

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By the time the Roaring Twenties were in full swing, the half-century long population decline began to reverse. Electricity had finally been introduced, decades after it had in inland cities, and land began to skyrocket in value as land speculators started to purchase acreage on the cheap due to the prior years of economic decline felt on the Cape. This contest for land was a foreshadowing of what was to come later. In short time, the lack of demand caused by the Great Depression and the Second World War greatly destroyed land values, but it would only prove to be a pause in the overall trend. One inadvertent benefit of the war effort was that the Cape experienced a surge of military personnel stationed there due to its strategic position, all of whom could provide free word-of-mouth advertising (J. C. O’Connell, 2002). With the return to normalcy and the economic boom following the war, it was once again off to the races. It is safe to say that by the 1950s Cape Cod and Nantucket had fully transitioned to a seasonal tourism economy. However, simply thinking in terms of a change in mode of production or sector of the economy understates the wholesale change that had taken place. Cape Cod of the 1950s and beyond was a completely different place than it had been only 100 years prior. The precarity that had always been part of life on the Cape that required the people to diversify beyond agriculture into fishing and light manufacture had transformed to a different kind of precarity predicated on seasonality and a relatively short tourism season. But no longer could it be said that Cape Cod was a poor place. Geographer Lewis Alexander acknowledged this changed condition in taking stock of the impacts tourism had already had on the Cape Cod economy in 1953: “With its economic re-emphasis the Cape has become a wealthy area; its landscape is being transformed, and its people are now accustomed to a new way of life, dependent for its existence on a hectic 12-week summer season” (Alexander, 1953, p. 325). Not surprisingly, the relationship between long-time Cape families and the tourists was mixed as it is in so many other places that have embraced the mercurial industry. The social distance between the vacationers and the local natives could often seem like a chasm and locals would frequently inflate prices on their goods and services in order to make as much as they could during the short three month season (J. C. O’Connell, 2002). Regardless of the benefits or drawbacks experienced by traditional Cape Codders due to tourism, perhaps the most impactful shift was that they were beginning to become the minority as the number of year-round inhabitants had increased so much that the “washashores” as outsiders were known locally, came and bought up property. Perhaps the most famous of these were Kennedys, after patriarch Joseph Kennedy purchased the first of three houses in 1928 that would comprise their compound in Hyannis Port. Scenes of this “Camelot by the Sea” fired the imaginations of millions of Americans who came to see Cape Cod as a quintessential summer playground for the elite. How much the Kennedys played a role in pushing others to migrate to the Cape would be impossible to calculate, but it is safe to say that they remain a significant attraction to this day. Whatever the various selling factors, people were sold on the idea of living and owning their own places out on the Cape and islands.

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Over four decades from the 1940s through the 1970s, Barnstable County recorded the fastest growth rates in Massachusetts, including rates over 50% in the 1950s and 1970s. In the 1980s it fell to second behind Martha’s Vineyard (Dukes County) only to have Nantucket take the prize in the 1990s (Schneider, 2000). But the 2000s found a divergence in the demographic trends between the Cape and the Islands. Martha’s Vineyard (Dukes County) and Nantucket continued to grow as the two fastest in the state respectively. Meanwhile, Barnstable County experienced population decline of close to 3%, the greatest rate of population loss in the state during the decade. Even more dramatic was the sharp downturn in the number of young people with those under 18 declining by 18% over the decade (Shemkus, 2011). In other words, it would seem that the Cape has been aging. For a region that relies on tourism, having a smaller youth population is a pressing concern considering that teenagers and college-age workers have historically comprised a key portion of the seasonal tourism workforce. In short, on top of the overall challenge of finding young workers in an era where fewer and fewer are interested in working at all outside of school, let alone a summer job, there is an ever shrinking pool from which to recruit them. The booming population on the Cape and Islands over the second half of the 20th Century created the potentially foreseeable if not inevitable consequence of rapidly inflating the price of land and housing. Naturally, the ability of the region to absorb new citizens is met with a limit on the land that is available to contain them. This is obvious with regard to islands, but Cape Cod itself, being a narrow peninsula only has so many directions toward which development can proceed. On top of this, over the years, a great deal of the land both on the Cape and on the islands has been set aside for conservation. An enormous swath of 27,000 acres of land on the Lower Cape was forever protected from development when the Cape Cod National Seashore was established in 1966. Yet another 30,000 acres are protected by towns, state parks, and in private land preserves (J. C. O’Connell, 2002).

Theme Park for the Rich? Walking through the streets of downtown Nantucket, one quickly gets the sense that it is a place oozing in wealth and privilege. Aside from fairly typical but quaint gift shops, most of the storefronts along the historic cobblestone streets cater to wealthy clientele with high end fashion and art far out of the reach of the average American vacationer (see figure 5.4). Similarly, most restaurants offer a gourmet experience. This is not the far more egalitarian but admittedly lowbrow experience of driving along Highway 17 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with every example of chain restaurant and a Wings or Eagles T-shirt shop at nearly every major intersection. Every store here is unique. There are no Starbucks locations in Nantucket. In a remarkable case of irony, the place that in a roundabout etymological sense provided the international

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coffee behemoth with its brand name1 banned all chain stores and restaurants in 2006 (Stowe, 2006). This decision made by over 500 voters at a town meeting was aimed at preserving Nantucket’s historical character, but also serves to make the journey to the island a singular experience. As one local business owner who voted for the ban was quoted at the time, “Nantucket is a hassle to get to, it’s expensive, and if, when you got there, you find the same thing at home, it reduces the experience” (Stowe, 2006, p. 5). Besides the obvious effects of a chain store ban is the fact that in banning the sort of stores that proliferate elsewhere around the United States, Nantucket has made itself more exclusionary. Not every place can make a ban like this succeed in part because many of the kind of stores that the island is able to prevent locating there are those where working class people are more likely found shopping for more affordable, if less unique merchandise. A house painter who lives on a boat moored in the harbor was quoted in a local article on the gentrification of the island: “Nantucket is not a town any longer. It’s a theme park for the rich. If you’re going to have a store in the Main Street shopping district, the rents are so high, they’re not going to sell $5 tube socks. It’s like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.” (Stowe, 2006, p. 5) Yet, not everyone that lives in Nantucket is a member of the super-elite. Roughly 17,000 people live year-round on the island. Life during the winter months still remains rather harsh and isolated, something many of the wealthiest choose to avoid. But once the warm weather returns in the late spring so do the second-home owners and other vacationers. By the time the summer season reaches its peak, Nantucket’s population has more than doubled to about 50,000. These people are decidedly wealthy in comparison and provide the spending in the short summer season that provides the lifeblood to the local economy. The return of these part-time residents, renters and owners, sets off the beginning of an annual housing scramble, well known on the island as the “Nantucket Shuffle.” In 2014 almost a quarter of the yearround Nantucketers were under 10 month leases, leaving them to compete with seasonal renters during the height of seasonal demand. A local restaurant owner and chef named Gabe described the hard realities of being a landlord in this shuffle when home owners must force lower-paying locals to leave during the peak season in order to earn the higher rental fees during the peak:

1 Herman Melville was famously inspired by to write Moby Dick by the experiences of Nantucket whalers. The most notable of these was the tragic sinking of the Essex after being rammed by a sperm whale which left the survivors adrift in a small boat only to end up resorting to cannibalism. The first mate of the ship the Pequod, Starbuck, was a Nantucket Quaker with a name likely inspired by the real-life Starbuck family. One of the most important families shortly after its settlement by English colonists were the Starbucks. One person in particular, Mary Coffin Starbuck, was responsible for welcoming the Quakers to the island after which the faith became dominant there (Philbrick, 2015).

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Figure 5.4: Historical downtown area of Nantucket. Source: Photo by author. Cobblestone Streets are characteristic of the historical downtown area of Nantucket that now caters to the wealthiest clientele. There’s plenty of demand. But there’s also a handful of nice people on the island who don’t want to gouge, and there’s people who, it kind of sucks. They have like, we had neighbors last year before we moved, and they had this beautiful house. They’ve got a great cottage house on it. And as much as in their heart, they’d love to rent it to people year-round, there’s no money in that for them, if they rent it as a weekly rental all summer, and in the winter time, they were putting people in there. But then they’re putting families who are in need and can’t find anything else. So they sign up for winter housing, then come June, we’ve got a family of four living in their house, and they have to kick them out. And they know them. “I’m not putting anybody in the house for the winter anymore. I can’t do it, because it kills me to have to kick them out. And it’s not working for me.

As a local resident, Gabe further described the experience of the Nantucket Shuffle rather as simply something that one must accept if one wants to live in Nantucket full time. “Oh yeah. My first couple of years here, my first five, six years here, I lived in shit. Even the last, I don’t know, we’ve been here for 13 years and I couldn’t count the amount of houses. A dozen, easy . . . Well, we like it here, and we make it worthwhile. We always could move to Idaho.” The reality of Nantucket is that there simply is not enough housing to go around when it is needed the most and what is available is extremely expensive. The Nantucket Shuffle is only one symptom of a local housing market that has become one of the tightest and most expensive in the whole country. In 2015, Housing Nantucket, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing affordable housing to the residents of Nantucket, produced a workforce housing needs assessment. The following year the Nantucket Planning Board approved a Housing Production Plan to attempt to address the lack of housing options on the island. Both the assessment and the plan were unambiguous in illustrating the steep challenge that Nantucket faces in housing its work force. Of particular note is incredible mismatch

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between local incomes and the typical housing costs. The astronomical median home price of $1.2 million effectively prices out 90% of the year-round families earning an average of $92,800 per year. Were there a high number of housing options on the island, even a high median home price might still leave room for a decent number of affordable options, but Nantucket has fewer than 12,000 housing units, two-thirds of which are occupied seasonally. In other words, the real estate market is dominated by second-home owners that have both driven up the total costs of housing and reduced the overall supply of available properties for workers. The yawning gap between housing affordability and average housing costs on Nantucket creates a growing challenge that the entire community is forced to face. Nancy, a local minister who works as part of a local International Student Outreach Program (ISOP) views housing as a principle that strikes at the very soul of the community. every single one of those rich people needs someone to serve them in some way . . . I’m telling you, the housing crisis on this island is out of sight. They’re not only people who are J-1 visa students who are immigrants, but we have doctors and nurses and teachers and ministers. I mean, we have people who have tons of money to spend who can’t have, nevermind the kid who’s got a couple of bucks. I mean, the housing crisis on an island where half the houses are lived in two weeks out of year. If that. I mean, it’s a moral crisis. It’s not just a physical crisis . . . Yeah. There’s something wrong here. And no one knows how to fix it. We just can’t figure it out . . . .

While Nancy worries that the housing crisis has now gotten beyond the ability of the local community to fix, this doesn’t mean that they are not trying.

Housing Nantucket As the workforce housing shortage continued to worsen more attention was paid to finding solutions. Efforts have come both through local community action and through official public channels. In 1994, community members established a non-profit organization, Housing Nantucket, with the aim of curbing the flow of residents to the mainland who could no longer afford to live there. Much of the effort has been in providing affordable rental housing to working-class residents on the island. The organization was founded on the premise that as a private entity, they could work more nimbly with fewer restrictions than the local government housing authority. Among these constraints were that the housing authority was required to provide housing to anyone in the state who was eligible, with a target of mostly very low income citizens. Anne Kuszpa, the director of Housing Nantucket described this as problem of not targeting enough of the population that was already present on the island: So that was one thing that they were like, you know, some of those board members back in the early 90s were like, ‘This is ridiculous. We’re trying to create affordable housing and we have all these extra hoops to go through, that make it so much more expensive’. So that was

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number one. A number two was the fact that the income level that housing authorities serve is low income, but on Nantucket it wasn’t just very low income that needed affordable housing. It was low, moderate and middle income that needed housing help as well, because the prices were so high. So in order to serve those higher brackets there needed to be this nonprofit whose mission was focused around serving and creating housing for Nantucket residents too . . . . . With the nonprofit our income levels are at those levels like the McDonald’s worker. I mean, even though there’s no McDonald’s here.

With missions not necessarily intended to help solve broad income spectrum housing issues that plague working-class residents in tourism areas, many housing authorities may simply not be equipped to engage the full scope of the challenge. Housing Nantucket’s solution is to meet an established need in the community by working with the town in ways that allow them to operate independently but with public support. In fact, without the support of the town it is doubtful that the organization could function very well, namely in securing land. As a non-profit organization, it faces the same cost-prohibitive land market that any other private entity faces. As a result, they have needed to be creative in how to secure buildings and land on which to build housing. Luckily, unlike local residents or businesses, Housing Nantucket has managed to secure some municipal land over time that the town had specifically determined to divest with the intended purpose of granting to nonprofit organizations that intended to create affordable housing. In part due to these accepted proposals, Housing Nantucket now maintains 38 rental units in properties that are deed-restricted in perpetuity in order to only house workers who prove they are within a certain income threshold and live and work year-round on the island. As of April 2020, the qualifying income for renting one of these properties at 50–120% of the area median income, was between $40,900 and $98,160, a clear reflection of how expensive housing costs have become in Nantucket. Housing Nantucket has also developed a covenant program by which existing owners in Nantucket agree to sell either a second dwelling or portion of their property at a permanently affordable price. Families earning below 150% of the area median income are welcomed to apply and maximum sales prices are set also based on median incomes determined by HUD. In 2020 the maximum sales price cap was set at $824,401. While this is still not exactly inexpensive, it brings these homes permanently into a range that is perpetually more affordable to many local working families rather than just the super-wealthy. Housing Nantucket has facilitated the creation of and continues to monitor the sales and residency compliance of 95 homes in this way, much in the same vein as the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust and Jackson/ Teton Housing Department. These efforts, while effective, can only serve to alleviate a small portion of the shortage which remains enormous. For this reason, the town itself has come to realize the need to invest in working toward building back toward social sustainability with political solutions, a subject I turn to in chapter eight. Cape Cod/Nantucket and Jackson Hole, two places separated by 2,500 miles and existing in very different physical settings, share remarkable similarities. Both

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are places that are isolated, although by entirely different circumstances. Both have developed second-home markets dominated by the super-wealthy that have led to a steady erosion of workforce housing. However, both have come to rely on guest workers to make up for the lack of workers who cannot afford to live there, and both struggle to house the very seasonal workers that are necessary because there is not enough adequate housing. Of course, it is one thing to turn to guestworker programs out of desperation, it is another to experience how they actually exist and function. While guestworkers may seem like a panacea to an industry that struggles to stay adequately staffed, the visa programs to welcome them have inevitably come with some caveats that make utilizing them at times less than ideal to both employers and employees. As it turns out, the purposes for and how legislation passed to create both the J-1 and the H-2B visas play a large role in how useful they can actually be to employers. As the next section illustrates, there really is no one-size-fits-all sort of guestworker program from the perspective of tourism management.

6 Put our Service to the Test: Employing Guestworkers Building Bridges With the J-1 Visa When cultural exchanges began following the original Fulbright legislation, the money required to send Americans to other countries was funded as a means to pay for the surplus equipment left over in these countries following WWII. However, funding on the American side to bring over foreign scholars was handled domestically. The funding stream as originally conceived did not provide much beyond travel grants to cover the costs of transport to the United States. From the start, cultural exchanges were designed in such a way to encourage the involvement of the private sector in international education as Senator Fulbright himself explained: The Fulbright Act was designed to encourage co-operation between private groups and the government, the resources of the one expanding to supplement the activities of the other. Representatives of American universities have emphasized that the government’s program both stimulates and supplements private investments in the exchange field and that much of this private contribution would diminish if such a program did not exist. One university, for example, has reported that the foreign scholarship program sponsored by its student government is based on the assumption that a substantial number of those selected for this assistance will be able to obtain travel grants, and this program would be jeopardized if these grants were not available. Such concern is understandable when it is recalled that fully three- fourths of the Department of State’s grantees receive only travel grants and rely upon private American scholarships for most of the funds needed for tuition and living costs. (Fulbright, 1961, p. 22)

This legacy of public and private partnership in international education is still very much evident in the structure of the J-1 BridgeUSA programs today, particularly in the fact that students themselves must provide their own means of travel to the United States. It is perhaps even more evident in the fact that while oversight of the J-1 programs is conducted by the Department of State, the actual administration of the programs is the role of private entities. It is in this function that we see the nature of the public-private partnership on full display. The role of the DOS Office of Private Sector Exchange in this case designates private partners to administer the various J-1 programs. It is these private organizations that range from academic institutions to for-profit businesses that are granted the power to act as sponsors to bring in foreign visitors. The program sponsors that administer the J-1 programs play a central role in facilitating the movement of thousands of international citizens into and out of the United States every year. Over 3,600 sponsor organizations have been designated by the Department of State to administer the various J-1 programs. However, of these, just 38 handle the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program, a number that has shrunk https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-006

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over time. In this way, the DOS serves in a role of rulemaking and oversight, but the day-to-day management of the exchange programs is run by the various sponsors. Sponsors are responsible for all aspects of the SWT program, from selecting and vetting each of the international students before they arrive, matching them with employers, and monitoring their lives while they are present in the United States. These responsibilities are detailed under Title 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations (22 C.F.R. § 62.9). Sponsors are the only entities that are authorized to provide potential J-1 applicants with a DS-2019 form, also known as the “Certificate of Eligibility for Exchange Visitor (J-1) Status.” This basic document therefore saves as the gateway to participation in a cultural exchange, and the designated sponsors serve as the gatekeepers. This positions sponsors in the role of chief intermediary in the SWT labor market. When a business wishes to hire a J-1 student they must contact a sponsor. While sponsors can be various types of institutions, in the context of the SWT they provide services to employers similar to temporary employment agencies in terms of giving something close to on-demand access to short-term workers for low-skilled positions. Critics take issue at the basic premise of the sponsors’ role in the SWT program, who argue that it represents an inherent conflict of interest since they are in charge of both overseeing their J-1 participants’ welfare as well as attending to the employment needs of their business clients (Francis, 2019). This claim is certainly debatable, but points to the fact that one of the most important functions of Department of State is to ensure that the organizations they have designated as program sponsors are continually fulfilling their responsibilities. In this role they have been active at times in suspending or revoking the designation of those sponsors that have acted contrary to the regulations. Oversight of these sponsors by DOS and private actors who serve to advocate for the SWTs is further discussed in subsequent chapters. However, it is notable that since 2012 a moratorium has been in place on the acceptance of new sponsors to the Summer Work Travel program and for the trainee and intern programs since 2017. This measure was ostensibly taken after several bad actors had been weeded out by the DOS. Those that remain seem to have the trust of DOS, at least for now. In terms of worker recruitment, employers can take a more active role if they wish. Many managers interviewed for this project either interviewed potential SWT workers via teleconferencing prior to selecting them or in some more extreme cases, actually traveled to the country where students were coming from to conduct interviews in person. Some sponsors even invite an employer representative to travel as part of the screening process without cost, but this varies by employer and sponsor and many just accept those who the sponsors have selected for them. In either case, it is ultimately the responsibility of sponsors to screen participants and make final selections. Employers may or may not pay the sponsors a fee for each student worker that is supplied to them, also based on the individual policies and the level of service provided. A review of several very large SWT sponsors charged no fees to the employers,

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suggesting they recover all their cost from fees paid by the students. Employers are also required to pay at least the local minimum wages to SWTs, or a wage that is similar to their U.S. counterparts working in similar jobs, whichever is higher. While together this drives up costs per worker, the employers are not required to pay payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare) to the federal government which helps them to offset their costs of accessing workers through the J-1 program. If speaking simply in terms of wages, J-1s are cheaper than H-2B workers who are paid the prevailing wage as set by the DOL to match the local labor market. When compared to the H-2B, hiring J-1s provides other cost benefits as well. One big difference is that J-1s pay for their own transportation to the United States, their own required health insurance, and are also responsible for visa application costs that employers have been required to cover with the H-2B program since 2015. Students also must pay a placement fee to the sponsor. These costs are an essential feature of the J-1 that allows it to be a mostly self-sustaining program at least from the perspective of the U.S. government. However, these fees are also ones that have received attention by critics who see them as a mechanism by which student workers accumulate debt prior to their travel to the United States. With fees climbing to several thousand dollars, J-1 workers can easily find themselves spending their entire time during the exchange simply paying back their fees and/or working multiple jobs. As these fees are one of many features of the J-1 that have the potential of creating precarity for student workers they are addressed further in Chapter 7. Because the purpose of J-1 is cultural exchange, the positions available to SWTs are supposed to involve some element of interaction with U.S. citizens and their culture by working alongside Americans and in other ways that bring them into contact. Thus, jobs that put student workers in a position to serve U.S. customers would typically be appropriate. Sponsors are also responsible for ensuring that SWTs are also afforded opportunities to engage with cultural activities outside from work by arranging activities or planning events that further expose students to U.S. culture. Because the language of these requirements is rather open, the nature of the jobs that SWTs end up performing are quite varied. There are further stipulations on the type of positions in which sponsors may place participants. One is that any job placement must be of a nature that satisfies a one-time occurrence, a peak load need, or an intermittent need. This language is almost exactly that as it pertains to the H-2B visa, which helps to explain how they tend to be clustered in similar positions and places. Other provisions are related to prohibitions on particular types of work that may be performed by SWTs, such as (but not limited to) those that involve licensing requirements, work in adult entertainment, commission-based salaries, domestic help, gambling, warehousing, vehicle operation, agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. It is the role of the sponsors to vet any positions and the workplace before a BridgeUSA participant begins their job. This is true both for initial job placements or any subsequent employment that a student may opt to do during their program window. In practice, it is very common to see SWTs working more than one job. Typically, one

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workplace serves as the initial employer that accesses the student worker through the sponsor. Once in the country, however, the students are free to pursue other employment opportunities as long as it does not interfere with their primary job. As a result, it is very common to meet an SWT who is working full time at a gift shop or restaurant and part time bagging groceries or scooping ice cream or any variation of these type of jobs. Indeed, I met many employers who were happy to give the J-1 students a job but did not serve in the role of primary employer. Aside from vetting employers, sponsors are also obligated to provide assistance to their SWT participants if they have decided to seek a different job placement, even if the sponsor had placed the worker with that company originally. This is one of the points of conflict of interest that critics have argued pit the welfare of the students against the business interests of sponsors. As part of its administration responsibilities, sponsors are granted access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a web-based system for maintaining information on international exchange visitors. Records pertaining to the nonimmigrant visitors on the J-1 and other student exchange visas are kept up to date electronically in this database by sponsors in order to allow for accurate data reporting and for state authorities to quickly identify issues such as violations that require enforcement action.

The “B” Stands for “Byzantine” – Using the H-2B If there is a single word to describe the H-2B program, the processes required to become eligible as a business to utilize it, the multiple layers of rules governing its use, and the ways that the responsibilities associated with managing it are shared across multiple federal agencies, the euphemistic term would be, “complex.” Others might use stronger language. Either way it is safe to say that even the most strident defenders of the H-2B must acknowledge that it is a program that is cumbersome due to the high level of bureaucracy that resides within its DNA. Management and responsibilities have evolved somewhat over time, however, today responsibility for the program spreads across several different cabinet level federal agencies: the Department of Labor (DOL), The Department of State (DOS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (UCSCIS) and DOL’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) jointly administer the program. Since 2009, DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) has been given an enforcement role to ensure H-2B workers are employed in compliance with H-2B labor certification requirements with power to levy penalties on employers who violate program rules (see Figure 6.1). Even so, this joint enforcement role was challenged in courts and has only been in full effect since 2015. The rules and regulations governing the H-2B have also evolved somewhat over time, with some significant changes happening within the last decade.

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Department of Labor

Department of Homeland Security

Department of State

National Prevailing Wage Center Employer submits form for prevailing wage determination 150-135 days before start date of work If employer accepts PWD, otherwise may request review or appeal if post-review wage is

Office of Foreign Labor Certification •

•

•

•

90-75 days before start date of work Employer submits Job Order Request to State Workforce Agency (SWA) Employer applies for Temporary Employment Certification If application is accepted, SWA and employer begin recruitment of U.S. workers 30 days before start date, final determination

U.S. Consular Affairs • •

If employer is certified, otherwise employer may appeal

OFLC conducts post-employment audit. If deficiencies are found may refer case to WHD

Wage and Hour Division •

•

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services •

• •

•

Employer submits I129 Petition of Nonimmigrant Worker USCIS lottery to select employer petitions USCIS reviews petitions for deficiencies Approval or Denial

•

Employer recruits foreign workers Worker files visa application and visits consulate for interview Visa is issued or refused o If refused, worker may attempt to remedy deficiencies

Customs and Border Protection Worker applies for admission

Employer must maintain records and ensure H-2B rules are followed Investigation if audit reveals deficiencies or a complaint is filed

Figure 6.1: The Byzantine Nature of the H-2B Hiring Process. Source: Adapted from Bier (2021). This is a simplified representation of the processes associated with hiring an H-2B worker. Many forms and separate processes for appeal and review have been omitted for clarity. See Bier’s flowchart for a real appreciation of the bureaucracy.

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From an employer’s perspective utilizing the H-2B program is a complicated process. These rules are contained in Title 20 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 655 – Temporary Employment of Foreign Workers in the United States, Subpar A – Labor Certification Process and Enforcement of Attestations for Temporary Employment in Occupations Other Than Agriculture or Registered Nursing in the United States (20 CFR § 655.6). Because the purpose of the H-2B as described in U.S. law is to allow the temporary use of foreign workers in a way that does not adversely affect domestic workers’ wages or working conditions in jobs or places where not enough sufficient workers can be found, the first part of the process involves employers proving that their needs are not being met domestically. The first step employers take is to obtain a prevailing wage determination from the National Prevailing Wage Center, which is housed in the Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC-DOL). The prevailing wage rate was a feature of this program since the years of the Bracero and Caribbean labor programs during WWII. The idea is that foreign workers should not be allowed to be paid less than local workers in an effort by employers to undercut domestic workers’ wages. It is currently defined as the average wage paid to people working in similar specific occupations in the specific area where the work is to take place. Once filed, this determination can take up to two months to complete, so employers are advised to begin at least 60 days before they plan to begin recruitment. Hotel and resort managers who are hoping to bring in H-2B workers by the Spring must start this process in the Autumn. Next, employers must attempt to hire workers locally first, and fail to do so, in order to demonstrate an actual labor shortage. This process requires employers to post a job order for the positions that will be required with their corresponding State Workforce Agency for at least ten days. Any American worker seeking employment can apply directly through these agencies. Until 2019, employers were also required to advertise at least twice in local print newspapers, one of which had to be published on a Sunday (typically the day with the largest circulation). Due to declining newspaper readership and a clear shift toward job-searches online, the newspaper advertising requirement has been curtailed. Instead, the DOL will post ads on behalf of employers to its new seasonal employment online search portal: seasonaljobs.dol.gov. Once employers are still unable to fill all needed positions, they can then submit an Application for Temporary Employment Certification. At this time the employer must attest that their need is a one-time or intermittent occurrence, a seasonal requirement, or due to peak load. These needs (except in the case of a one-time need) must be less than nine months. If the application is successful, they will then be certified to hire a specific number of foreign workers for the specific positions they requested. The latter point is important as any workers brought in on the H-2B must remain in those exact positions for the duration of their stay in the United States with the employer.

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Once certified to employ temporary foreign workers, employers must then file a form I-129 Petition for Nonimmigrant Worker with USCIS along with their Approved Labor Certification Determination. Meanwhile, the workers who have already been identified (typically through a recruitment agency) must themselves apply for their H-2B visa at the U.S. consulate in their home country. In short, the employer is directly petitioning for a specific set of workers who are then only authorized to work for that single employer once awarded an H-2B visa. This tight connection between employer and temporary worker is one of the major factors that critics of the H-2B program argue creates an inherently vulnerable situation for the worker who must accept the conditions of work after arrival with little other recourse besides returning home unemployed. This is a topic that is explored later in the next chapter. While this represents the basic process for legally importing workers on the H-2B, there are a great many rules additionally embedded in the program that ostensibly serve to protect workers and local workforces. Many guidelines pertain to how wages will be earned with guarantees on the number of hours worked. For example, wages must not be based on sales commissions or bonuses unless the employer offers a guaranteed minimum that is at least equal to the offered wage, which by law must be at least at or above the prevailing wage determination. Work amounting to at least three-quarters of the workdays in each 12-week period must also be guaranteed. As a measure to protect local workers, all wages, benefits, and working conditions that are offered to H-2B workers, must also bet offered to American workers. For example, if housing or healthcare insurance is offered to an H-2B worker, it must also be available to any American workers as well. This idea is to create a seemingly level playing field so that one group of workers does not have an advantage over another. Adding to the complexity of using the H-2B is the fact that since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990, a statutory cap of 66,000 visas has remained in effect that limits the number of foreign workers who can be admitted under the program. In other words, once the cap is reached, no more workers can be allowed to enter with an H-2B visa for the rest of the fiscal year. This sets it apart from the H-2A visa used in agriculture which maintains no cap on the total amount of potential workers that can be admitted. For many years from its inception in 1986 until the early 2000s, H-2B usage remained well under this annual cap. In 1992, for example, the State Department issued just over 12,500 H-2B visas. Over the next decade, however, the program consistently grew until it was exceeding the cap every year from 2002 through 2009 when the global financial crisis drastically reduced demand for labor in the tourism sector (Pickral, 2008). Prior to the financial crisis, however, as soon as the demand for H-2B workers began to exceed the cap the problems associated with the timeline governing its use began to emerge. Since applications for Temporary Labor Certification had to be submitted within 120 days of the date when workers were needed, those who wished to utilize the program later in the year found themselves at the back of the line and without a chance to bring in workers when the cap was reached within three months.

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As a result, in a strongly bi-partisan effort, Congress took up the issue through the “Save our Small and Seasonal Business Act” that eventually was incorporated into the Real ID Act of 2005. This legislation divided the annual 66,000 cap into two semiannual caps of 33,000 split between the first and second halves of the fiscal year (33,000 each between October 1 and March 31, and between April 1 and September 30 respectively). When the cap is reached in each period, no more visas are issued. The Real ID Act also responded to the increased demand that was clearly exceeding 66,000 by temporarily permitting the reissue of visas that would not count against the cap for workers who had participated with the program in the previous three years and would be returning to the same employer (Zavodny & Jacoby, 2010). As a result of this returning worker exemption, between 2005 and 2007 the total number of visas issued well exceeded 66,000, peaking at almost 130,000 in 2007. After 2007, this temporary legislative measure lapsed as the full weight of the recession made it unnecessary. With the economic fallout stemming from the global financial crisis, fewer people found themselves with the disposable incomes to spend on vacations and demand for workers fell off sharply. However, even at the worst points in 2009 and 2010 during the economic downturn, no fewer than 44,000 and 47,000 H-2B’s workers were still certified for employment. Even more striking is that the percentage of certified position in tourism and hospitality related occupations was significantly higher in 2010 than it was in 2016 when the demand for H-2Bs had recovered. In 2010, 27% of all H-2B certified positions were for tourism and hospitality occupations, while in 2016 it fell to 14%. In other words, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, employers at resorts, hotels, and restaurants were able to demonstrate to the government’s satisfaction that they could not find enough unskilled workers. This points to the special nature of tourism labor markets that present staffing challenges not only of a temporal seasonal nature but that are also geographic in nature where isolation and lack of workforce housing reduce the availability of workers. With the economic recovery that followed the global recession, demand for workers slowly returned and eventually the cap was being met again by 2014 and 2015. As a result, the returning worker exemption was reinstated for the 2016 fiscal year. However, the following year with Donald Trump taking office in January 2017 saw a change to the policy as Congress allowed the returning worker exemption to expire. Instead, Congress authorized DHS to make more H-2Bs available once it was determined that the demand for workers could not be satisfied by the U.S. labor market. In response, DHS and DOL authorized an additional 15,000 H-2Bs for 2017, which was ultimately repeated in 2018. In both years, however, employers wishing to access the additional visas were required to complete additional forms attesting that they would suffer irreparable harm if they were unable to employ the H-2B workers they requested. The year 2019 proved to be an exceptional year with incredibly high demand for the H-2B program that sparked change both in how the DOL handled applications and in awakening dramatic legislative action to provide cap relief. The first moment came early on the very first day of the year, January 1 when application

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filing officially begins for the upcoming spring and summer season. Within five minutes of opening the system to applications, roughly 23,000 login attempts were registered, 30 times the number from 2018 when the DOL first began using the online application system. While the DOL process had previously ranked applications on a first-come, first-serve basis, when handling mailed applications, the agency could manage its efforts and spread out processing applications through human effort. In an electronic system, with the timing and ranking of applications measured in milliseconds, employer applicants had every incentive to submit their applications at the earliest possible moment when the window to do so opened. As a result, the tally of applications for labor certification on the first day reached 5,276 with a total request of over 96,000 workers. By February 22, DOL announced that employers had already used up the rest of the visa slots for that year, the earliest they had ever reached the cap. With such high demand, business leaders and chambers of commerce around the country successfully lobbied congressional representatives from both sides of the political spectrum to once again step in to raise the cap. This time, the cap was doubled to just over 135,000, a number targeted as the highest number reached previously in 2007 (Maurer, 2019). The massive rush to apply for H-2Bs in the online system prompted another change in 2019. DOL announced that beginning with the July application opening for the beginning of the upcoming fiscal year, applications submitted in the first three days for workers that would begin at the beginning of the next season would be subject to a lottery system to determine the order in which to process applications. All other applications received after the first three days would be chosen at random for processing each day. Similarly, UCSIS had already begun in 2018 to apply a lottery system to the 15,000 additional visas approved by Congress in that year and has continued to do so ever since when the cap is reached. While this has been done in an effort to produce some fairness and reduce stress on the application system, it does also create added uncertainty to the hiring process on the H-2B. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report (GAO) from 2020 concurred with this assessment after interviews with users of the H-2B program. In particular, employers reported difficulties in planning, and reluctance to invest in expanding or renovating their properties. Many of the employers included in the study also expressed dissatisfaction with the lottery process as unfair due to the unpredictability of being able to determine if they will receive workers or not (GAO, 2020).

Navigating the H-2B with Outside Help As the previous section demonstrated, use of the H-2B undoubtedly comes with an added burden associated with navigating the bureaucracy that is part of the fabric of the program. From the extra work associated with developing the knowledge on how to properly prepare forms, to actually finding workers from outside the country,

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utilizing the H-2B goes beyond the scope of how most human resource managers are trained to operate. As a result, most employers that contract H-2B workers typically work with third-party agents who assist in navigating the H-2B application system and in labor recruitment. In 2020, with just over 8,000 separate applications submitted for temporary labor certification with the DOL, only 490 were prepared and submitted without representation by an agent or attorney. These agents represent a specific cottage industry that has arisen out the of need to comply with the federal agencies’ rules on the hiring of temporary seasonal workers. In some cases, people now working as H-2B facilitators had themselves previously been involved in hiring at resorts or hotels. Their experiences in both seeing the difficulties of finding and maintaining adequate staffing levels during peak tourism seasons and in learning how to follow the process of applying to hire H-2Bs led them to perceive the strong need to help other companies to solve their workforce shortages. One agent described the transition of his family’s business from a small bed and breakfast on Cape Cod in Massachusetts to a full-service workforce agency matching their clients with potential workers. When his mother found the duties of the bed and breakfast too much to handle on her own, she began to seek help only to find that few workers were available: She was looking for housekeepers, cooks, something where she could have a part-time person. She noticed, even in the late 90s, the labor shortage on Cape Cod . . . We all talked about it, that if she needed help for something like this, there must be a need for other companies in the same boat. There’s got to be other bed and breakfasts, restaurants, hotels that are scrambling for workers. Then it just took off from there. They started doing the research as to how to get into the industry, what they would need to do. I believe our first and second year open as a bed and breakfast, we actually used an agency similar to ours to do our H-2B paperwork. We found out about it through that system. Then from there, it became a business, and it’s been running full speed ever since . . . . It started purely as a part time thing with maybe four or five clients, a couple of local bed and breakfasts in the town my parents lived in. Then from there it became word of mouth and one person would tell another person about it and then another business in the town. Then we got clients up in Maine because that’s where our family is from. Then it expanded all the way down to Florida, all the way out to Seattle. We had a couple in Arizona. It just became a thing where the need is definitely there. The more people that find out about agencies like ours will reach out to us to try to get into the business, to see if they can get the staffing because there’s a shortage everywhere.

This account is in many ways like that of Elsa whose story of her transition from human resources manager to H-2B labor recruiter was detailed in chapter 4. Both of these agent experiences, and those of most other agents and recruiters, as well as employers I interviewed, showcase a key role in facilitating the process of both locating workers and handling the necessary paperwork. The extent of the services provided by agencies and attorneys varied from those such as attorneys who mostly helped navigate the regulatory burden to those like Elsa who handled both filing paperwork and actual recruitment on site in other countries. Only one employer interviewed for this project reported that he actively managed the process himself, and did so to save costs. But for most, it is the management of the minutiae associated

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with the H-2B that makes these “work migration entrepreneurs” so valuable to organizations in mobilizing a migrant labor force for them (Hernández-León, 2021, p. 8). In hiring labor brokers as needed, organizations are able to reduce the amount of permanent human resources staff needed to handle the H-2B process. At least one human resources director suggested as much in their reasons for utilizing a labor broker, “we go through that company in Florida to organize. I think if I had to organize 190 people flying in from Jamaica, that would be a full time job.” Nevertheless, the overhead costs associated with H-2B usage at least partly explains the differences between the type of organizations that tend to use H-2B workers rather than J-1 BridgeUSA participants. This is not the only difference between them, however. The structure and purpose of each visa makes a certain type of worker available to employers, and each may be more or less suitable depending on individual circumstances. Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all visa that creates the perfect sort of guestworker that is adaptable to all situations in all places. From the perspective of hospitality and tourism employers, each visa comes with benefits, but also some caveats.

J-1s, They are here to Work (and Party!) Across the United States in every mountain town and coastal village where I found J-1s working in great numbers, the responses from employers regarding how they feel about their international students is a testament to how valued they are as a group. Time and again when asked how they would fare without the J-1 visa to support them, most painted dire pictures of reduced hours, stressful workloads for domestic workers, poor quality service and a diminished ability to prosper and grow. Organizationally SWT’s come with the particular benefit of being easy to find and employ. In many ways they are exactly the sort of temporary labor force that employers love to have access to because the regulatory burden associated with securing them is so light, and they are employable almost on demand. A Cape Cod restaurant manager described what for her was the simplest process: What I do at the end of each season is, I email CIEE [the sponsor], saying, ‘Thank you for a wonderful season. We love your kids. We love the students. We’d love to have them back.’ So it’s a super simple procedure. CIEE sends me a piece of paper where I say, ‘Yes, I’ll hire them again.’ These are their responsibilities. This is how much they’re getting paid. We do not provide housing, but we do help with housing.

While the ease of the process she describes is certainly a bit of an embellishment, the kernel of truth remains that access to the great pool of foreign students through the J-1 is relatively painless. Part of the reason that it can be so much easier lies in the way that J-1 deals with the issues of ensuring that U.S. workers are not displaced by the hiring of a foreign student and paying them in accordance with local norms respective

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to each position. According to the regulations, sponsors are required to confirm both of these with employers when placing students. However, unlike the H-2B there is no certification mechanism associated with establishing that domestic workers will not be displaced or a prevailing wage determination such as that made by the DOL. It remains unclear both how the sponsors verify this information and how the Department of State verifies that sponsors are acting in accordance with these provisions. Although, in 2017 Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Private Sector Exchange, Kevin Saba reminded sponsors that DOS, ‘may at times gather information specific to these regulations,’ how often this occurs, and how effective this oversight is remains a mystery (Saba, 2017). What is clear is that without having to jump through regulatory hoops, worker recruitment on the J-1 visa is a breeze. Some employers also expressed great satisfaction with their international student workers, at least in comparison to many American workers. While these sorts of comments were common amongst employers, they were not universal. From the perspective of many businesses, actually employing SWT’s comes with several caveats. The first of these is the limitation on the length of time they may be employed. Although the program rules stipulate that these students must be employed in seasonal or peak load jobs, the length of time that extra workers are needed is typically longer than the window of time that they are allowed to work in the United States. Each country has an opening date and a closing date corresponding to their respective long break between academic years into which its participants must fit their employment. Most have a limit of up to four months. For some countries this window is as short as two months, while for others it is as long as five. The result is that most SWT participants average between three and four months of employment after which they receive a grace period of 30 days to travel and settle affairs, but not to work. For employers in locations where the peak demands exceed three or four months, many individuals they bring on board to work will leave before the time they are no longer needed. As a result, many businesses tend to stagger the start times of their SWT’s to ensure continuity of service during their peak. The opening and closing dates corresponding to various countries’ summer break is also a factor in determining where students from particular countries may be employed. Students from the Southern hemisphere are eligible to come the United States during winter months in the Northern hemisphere. As a result, students from Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, among others, are found in large numbers in mountain ski resorts operating chair lifts or working concessions. The opposite is more or less true for students hailing from the northern hemisphere where most program start dates are late May or early June. Certain countries, especially those in equatorial regions also have variable dates or ones that don’t neatly fit with the summer months of the United States. For example, Venezuela, Morocco, and Pakistan maintain rather late start dates in July, while the Philippines (March), Thailand (March), and Ecuador (January/February) all have earlier start times. As a result, it was very common for me to meet Filipino students in Myrtle Beach, South

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Carolina, during research trips as I learned that they were the most heavily used group brought in to handle the pre-Memorial day shoulder season. Some employers find that they can manage the staggered start dates of the SWT’s fairly well, especially for jobs that require minimal training. With overlap, those students who had been working for several weeks could help to orient those who were newly arriving, but other employers found the time limitations on individual J-1 workers to be particularly problematic. Rosalie, the human resources manager at a hotel and casino in the North Carolina mountains expressed this exact sentiment, J-1s are easier (than hiring H-2Bs), but you’re constantly having turnover with your J-1s, because they can only stay a certain amount of time. Yes, absolutely, they are over here to have a good time, and really just about the time you’ve got them, they’ve learned your business, they’ve learned the expectations; it’s time for them to go home.

Rosalie’s comments also reflected another common sentiment, namely that students working on the Summer Work Travel program are not professional hospitality workers and while their jobs are their means of coming to the United States, the work itself may not be their central focus. Debra, from another major mountain North Carolina employer echoed Rosalie but was even more pronounced in denouncing J-1s for their lack of professionalism: We have used the J-1 work travel program . . . and that has not been as well accepted by my management and operational staff, because they are definitely untrained. They usually don’t have the same skill set (As H-2Bs). And they’re really not here to work, they’re here to enjoy themselves and experience life. So you know you’re having to deal with them, they’re only here for 3 months, train them, get them productive and then they don’t really even want to come into work.

Ultimately the biggest differences between businesses that prefer to hire H-2Bs rather than SWTs are those that are particularly concerned with high levels of customer satisfaction or skill levels. These tend to be larger and/or more exclusive resorts where the interface with customers is a higher stakes game. For example, at Craig’s golf club restaurant in North Carolina, customers became familiar with H-2B workers who would continue to return to work over several years. Workers would get to know and anticipate individual customer personalities and demands. In contrast, SWTs were simply not suited for such positions considering their youth, inexperience, and the fact that they don’t really view these jobs as careers. His feelings on the contrast between H-2B and J-1 workers reflect the categorical differences between them and how their very purpose and the regulations built into their respective programs create different bodies of workers: I do not use the J-1 program. It’s not because the program isn’t good. For me, my experience is the way I’ve approached the J-1 program, we are a 6-month operation. Ok. So the J-1 does not generally bring in 6 month people. It brings them in for 3 or 4 months. And they’re young;

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most of them it’s a cultural exchange type of thing. Good program, but you are looking at 18 and 19 year olds and sometimes 20, and I have found for me, that when I’ve had to put those people in housing, I’m just being honest, I’m dealing with a party atmosphere. It’s a different animal. The H-2B program, I can get them for the full six months. Historically, these are mature, grown up individuals. Most of the H-2Bs that I’ve had are in their 30s or 40s, so I find them to be extraordinarily responsible. They’re here to work and make money. And I need them, I need them here sharp at 7:00 in the morning and I need them here sharp till midnight if I need them that way. So for me, and that’s just my personal view, and I pay money for that, obviously the J-1 program doesn’t cost anything, so you’d think I’d go that way. But I just have found for my operation, there are many people here in the Carolinas who use the J-1 program, including people in my area up here . . . . Sapphire Valley.. they also use the J-1 program, because they didn’t want to pay the fees, but for me it’s worth the price I pay to bring in the people that I’m bringing in. I’ve been very happy with what I’ve got.

In contrast, SWT’s are very common to see in even very small “mom and pop” type businesses any typical seasonal tourist destination. To this point, I have mostly focused on the Summer Work Travel program rather than the trainee and intern programs. This is partly due to the fact that they are much smaller in the total number of students involved in the exchange, but they are present in some hotels and resorts and are both regarded and used differently than SWT workers. Since these students are actually involved in learning a trade associated with hospitality and tourism, they come with a level of professionalism that is not found in the SWT students, and indeed at least one high-end resort in the North Carolina mountains was using them exclusively rather than SWTs or H-2Bs. But it should also be noted that while these J-1 programs are useful, they do not present the full solution that managers would hope for. For one, they are limited in number, as they must be students enrolled in foreign hospitality school programs. Also, they come with greater stipulation on the type of work they can and cannot do. For example, they are not to be employed at any time in positions that are deemed unskilled, such as housekeeping, and these tend to be the sort of positions that suffer the most acute shortages. Also, despite their longer duration spent with an organization, they do not solve the tenure of job problem because they are supposed to rotated through various departments so they can learn the full scope of a company’s operations. So much like the SWT program, the trainee and intern J-1 programs do not fully serve the needs of many resorts and hotels.

The H-2B in Use Despite the professionalism of H-2Bs and the length of time they are allowed to stay in the country, many employers find the program cumbersome and cost prohibitive to use. To some degree this has varied throughout time due to rule changes that have enhanced or detracted from its ease of use and shifted the financial responsibilities between employers and workers. For example, in 2008 the Bush Administration

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changed the process of applying for H-2B workers in order to streamline the recruitment process. For a short time, until the rule was reversed after only a couple years of use, the DOL only required that employers attest that they were short of workers. But after significant reports of abuse and fraud, the Obama administration reinstated a policy of labor certification that once again forced employers to prove they were experiencing a labor shortage. Also beginning in 2012, the costs to bring an H-2B worker to the United States increased significantly when the rules changed that shifted the financial burden of traveling to the worksite from workers to the companies who would be employing them. However, even more dramatic was the shift in the DOL methodology for determining the prevailing wages. The basic method used to make a prevailing wage determination is to calculate the average of U.S. wages within a normal commuting distance for a corresponding job category in the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics survey. The idea is to match wages as they exist in specific work locations. In practice, by using the average rather than median wages and highest potential wage within the commuting area, the DOL effectively forced wages to rise for H-2B. But because the prevailing wage determination must be made prior to attempting to hire domestic workers who must be offered work on exactly the same terms as H-2B workers, the effect is to push wages higher once a company has decided to move forward in the process of obtaining foreign labor certification. Whether or not the prevailing wage determination changes have been the most significant contributory factor, the wages of H-2B workers rose by almost 40% from 2011–2019. This is about double the increase of hourly wages seen across all U.S. jobs and about 15 percentage points higher than those seen in hospitality positions like housekeeping and serving (Bier, 2021). There is some evidence that the wage differentials between J-1 BridgeUSA students and H-2Bs are a factor in some businesses choosing the students. Several employers noted that the rising costs of the H-2B had led them or their industrial competitors to opt for J-1 workers exclusively as a guestworker option. Glenn, an attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center specializing in representing guestworkers on both visas noted this condition as well: as the H-2B program becomes more heavily regulated, particularly after we’ve won more lawsuits regarding how the wage methodology is being used to determine the prevailing wage that needs to be paid to H-2B workers and that those prevailing wages have increased, the J-1 program has become a more attractive work visa program for employers because there is no prevailing wage requirement. You just have to pay people the minimum wage. And so we’ve seen more and more employers who used to have H-2B workers, switch over to having more J-1 workers or J-1 workers and H-2B workers working side by side. The problem with the J-1 program or at least the SWT program for employers is that you need workers for longer than four months. And so then people start to do funny things with the J-1 intern and trainee stuff, because they can keep those folks for longer. But I still think it maybe doesn’t work as well for the hospitality industry yet to completely replace the H-2B workers with J-1 workers because of the time they need the H-2B workers. And the J-1s just can’t cover that whole time period.

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Yet, despite these wage increases, the industry still struggles to attract enough applicants, giving further credence to the argument that the seasonal nature of the positions and the remote locations where they are performed serve as major barriers to entry for domestic workers. The prevailing wage determination is also related to another issue that makes them somewhat difficult to use for some employers. When an employer applies for a prevailing wage determination they must do so for a specific position. Since this wage is calculated for one position only, any H-2B workers that are eventually hired must stay in this position. This policy is in place to protect both foreign workers and workers in the local labor markets. By preventing the shifting of guestworkers from one role to another once at the job site, employers cannot hire a worker at one salary only to later shift them to another position that normally would command higher wages. In this way, the local workforce is not undercut by lower-paid guestworkers, and the H-2B worker is not presented with the prospect of being promised one type of work and given another. This is the issue of job descriptions and how workers are too difficult to move around from one duty to another by terms of their employment. This provision has also been criticized, especially since more recent changes saw the DOL eliminate different skill levels associated with any particular job title. In the past, the system had allowed for workers with different levels of experience to be paid differently even for the same job title, but without that in place all workers domestic or foreign with the same job title in the same geographic area must be paid the same wage. In this way, simply applying for the H-2B prevailing wage determination presents the possibility of pushing wages higher for all workers if the calculation runs higher than previously paid to American workers. In other words, the costs of the H-2B can potentially run higher than simply the direct costs of the program but might also be distributed in the form of higher local wages, and pushing the wage floor higher is something that most businesses are loathe to do. This raises the prospect of employers writing job descriptions that help them to alleviate the risks of inflating wages. Furthermore, since any benefit that is provided to H-2B workers must also be provided to domestic workers in the same job description, costs can climb very quickly if relatively fewer H-2Bs are used to supplement a much larger group of American workers. This was something that Stuart, now retired with over 20 years’ experience and Kylie, a current human resources manager at a Jackson, Wyoming, ski resort, found made certain positions not suitable for H-2B workers despite the need: Stuart: The one thing we do know on the H-2B side of things, even in our industry, there’s a lot of people who will game that program. Particularly with the job descriptions, etcetera. Kylie: Exactly, yeah. And you know, why we’re just all right now dabbling in it, like with all these regulation changes that we’ve seen over the years, having to pay for people’s travel and someone in a similar position or in the same position. I mean, to open it up . . . Like right now

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I’m having a hard time finding lift operators, right? I could’ve easily hired H-2Bs, but there’s over 100 of them, 140 of them. Author: H-2Bs That you need? Kylie: No, that we have total at the resort. And so to pay the travel for the H-2Bs, plus the domestics, it just gets too cost prohibitive. Stuart: And it really might have changed, but it was really kind of murky even when I departed . . . There were some resorts that were paying travel for . . . Some were doing it just for the H-2Bs, some were . . . I think everybody started doing it for the H-2Bs, but they weren’t doing it for other folks. If you were coming from South Carolina, I think the regs say, “You’re doing it for an H-2B, you gotta do it for the Americans.” Kylie: Yeah, and that’s why we did the . . . We have different levels of cooks, we did cook twos, and we have six of them throughout the whole resort, so it’s like, ‘We’ll pay the extra two people to get four of them.’

In this case, Kylie found it necessary to only utilize J-1s as lift operators and use the H-2B but with two different cook positions to be able to take advantage of that program. With other positions that may not be as distinguishable the ability to “game the system” with different job descriptions may not as easily pass muster with DOL during the application process. For employers this offers another layer that makes the H-2B unwieldy to use in practice. Labor market flexibility is often expressed in terms of numerical flexibility, which the use of guestworkers does afford to employers in seasonal tourism industries. But managers also crave functional flexibility in their workforces if only because it gives them options of moving workers between different types of job duties as demands dictate. “The merits of functional flexibility are that they make better use of existing human resources and at the same time enhance job satisfaction and increase teamwork” (Riley et al., 2002, 34). The idea is that functional flexibility increases labor productivity by matching demand for workers within the organization and can lead to a need for fewer workers overall if a single worker can perform multiple tasks. Unfortunately for employers, the H-2B presents a legal barrier for functional flexibility as workers can only be utilized in the position for which they were originally contracted. For some businesses that are perpetually short-staffed in a single position, this may be just fine. But for others it can be problematic, as Rosalie described regarding her large North Carolina mountain hotel: And they can’t even switch over to a different position. If we bring them in as a housekeeper, we have to work them as a housekeeper. If we have too many housekeepers and want to move someone over to laundry, we can’t move those people, they have to stay in that housekeeper role for the entire time they are her . . . I think if there was some flexibility in it, if we had to continue to pay them the same, to have to continue to get them 40 hours a week, if we could move them into say a pool of between housekeeping, stewarding, laundry and we could move them where we needed them, that would be a lot more efficient for us . . . but yeah we could

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use them maybe 10% of the time to help with some other thing. You know if you are a housekeeper, we can’t move you over and work you in the kitchen for a month. But we can’t do anything like that with the H-2B.

The Department of Labor is certainly aware of these concerns as it solicits public response during open comment periods prior to rulemaking. It acknowledged as much in 2012 when issuing its final rule that updated H-2B provisions up to that time: Employers also expressed concern about how the corresponding employment provision would affect their flexibility in assigning workers different tasks. It is the employer’s obligation to state accurately on the Application for Temporary Employment Certification the job duties that their H–2B workers will perform and to comply with the terms of their labor certifications by limiting the H–2B workers to those duties. This will maximize the employers’ flexibility with regard to their U.S. employees. For example, if a restaurant receives a labor certification based on its temporary need for dishwashers, and it limits its H–2B employees to such duties, the restaurant may freely assign any of its U.S. workers to other jobs as needed, such as cashiers, servers and cooks. If the restaurant had previously used both its H–2B and U.S. workers interchangeably in various jobs, it must plan more carefully in the future in order to comply with the terms of its certification. (DHS & DOL, 2015, p. 10048)

While at times the DOL is responsive to industry criticism of its regulations when it can justify making new accommodations, in this case the state was clear by reaffirming its position on inflexibility of job duties. Similarly, DOL maintains a position that workers, even when working in the same job with the same tasks, cannot be moved to another location away from the job site that was originally used to make a prevailing wage determination. Since wage norms shift depending on where one is located in the country, bringing a worker in at one place only to shift them to another one where wages would typically be higher presents a means of undercutting a local workforce through spatial practice. This ultimately means that H-2B workers are not only tied to one particular employer, in one particular job, but are also rooted in place. There is irony in the fact that on one hand, the state manages to enhance the mobility of workers at an international level but immobilize them once arrived at a local level both physically and figuratively as part of the labor market.

Creating its own Demand? Something similar is also true in terms of just how much numerical flexibility is both afforded as well as limited by the H-2B regulation. The presence of the visa is one clearly meant to provide a means for seasonal businesses to match their intermittent labor demands with an equally flexible labor market. But once again in practice, because of the ways that the regulations were written to protect domestic workers from undue foreign competition, employers find that planning for the use

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of H-2Bs is a process riddled with frustration built around the rigid application timeline that was detailed above. As noted previously, employers must plan for their use of H-2Bs well ahead of the time they are actually required. This means that H-2B workers are often still present in the fall when companies must begin to start applying for the prevailing wage determinations for the next season’s workers. Any sudden shifts in local wages are not easily dealt with when this calculation is made based on the previous season. Second, and perhaps more important, the time when employers must actually begin to attempt to hire for the upcoming peak season is months in advance of when the first workers would be set to arrive. Maria, a human resources director at a South Carolina beach resort described the need to hire much earlier than she would typically do for any other positions: And the reason why that early is because we technically have to have those positions-we have to show the government by mid-December that we are unable to fill these positions locally, therefore we need to be approved for x-number of visas for the following season. Um, it’s hard, you know, . . . . I think timing is difficult too, we go by the timeline the government gives us. If we could open up these positions that start March 1st, if I could recruit for them in February, then I’d probably have better luck. Unfortunately, by January we already have to have our bed made and ready to go.

For others hiring H-2Bs for the winter season, not only do they need to attempt to hire locals much earlier than when the workers will be needed, but must also start early simply to compete with all other summer operators who are likely to use up the statutory cap limits when they apply in the first two months of the year. Kylie described this dilemma when trying to use the H-2B for the winter season at her ski resort: “Obviously, the summer is when everyone needs them, and if you’re not applying right on April first, you’re not going to get any.” While the division of the cap on H-2B workers into two fiscal years has helped to alleviate the difference between employers who maintain opposite seasons, there is still a sharp divide between the summer and winter. This effectively shifts the time when the labor shortage must be proved until later in the year, and due to competition from other employers wanting to take advantage of the programs it creates the same dilemma as when the application process begins for summer workers. Ultimately, a timeline which forces employers to prove that they have a labor shortage for seasonal positions months before they even begin virtually guarantees that they will be certified to bring in foreign workers as long as all other criteria are met. It is simply hard to imagine an unemployed person seeking a job during the winter would agree to a temporary job that would not start for several more months in an industry and position that already must fight against negative stigma. The DOL even admitted as much in justifying a priority hiring window (in which any successful U.S. applicant must be hired instead) that lasts until 21 days out from the start of the job:

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U.S. applicants – particularly unemployed workers – applying for the kinds of temporary positions typically offered by H–2B employers are often unable to make informed decisions about jobs several months in advance; it is far more likely that they are in need of a job beginning far sooner. In fact, many of these potential applicants may not even be searching for work as early as several months in advance and are therefore unlikely to see SWA job orders in the 10 days they are posted or the newspaper advertisements on the 2 days they are published in accordance with the 2008 rule’s minimum recruitment requirements. This segment of the labor force cannot afford to make plans around the possibility of a temporary job several months in the future. The 2008 rule’s recruitment and hiring structure simply cannot be reconciled with the Departments’ obligation to protect U.S. workers and ensure that qualified U.S. applicants are unavailable for a job opportunity before H–2B workers are hired. Requiring a priority hiring period until 21 days before the date of need is consistent with the DHS requirement that H–2B nonimmigrants not be admitted to the United States until 10 days before the date of need, see 8 CFR 214.2(h)(13)(i)(A), since it minimizes the possibility that a U.S. applicant could displace an H–2B nonimmigrant who has been recruited, traveled to the consulate, obtained a visa, or even begun inbound transportation to the worksite. At the same time, the 21-day provision still gives employers certainty regarding the timing of and need for their efforts to recruit prospective H–2B workers. (DHS & DOL, 2015, p. 24071)

The 21-day window after which employers are no longer obligated to hire domestic applicants was actually extended from three days before the start of the job in the 2012–2015 regulation updates to give some measure of confidence that that a latecoming American applicant couldn’t take the position away at the last second from an H-2B worker. For better or worse, considering the seasonal nature of jobs that are laden with negative stigma, even 21 days is likely farther out than for most Americans who would accept such a job. However, it appears this step was deemed necessary to give employers some assurance that their time would not be wasted, especially amidst their concerns of American workers who would begin a job only to quit, but only after ruining their chance of securing an H-2B worker. All this being said, due to the early start dates and the relatively early cutoff to the priority hiring period of American workers is very likely that the H-2B process, in a way, commands its own demand. But with currently constructed regulations in place to protect domestic workers from undue foreign competition, this is almost inevitable, and part of the reason that the cap is continually reached so quickly in the application period. The 66,000 Worker Question It remains unclear why 66,000 was chosen in the 1990 Immigration Act legislation as the appropriate cap for H-2B visas. But for over a decade it did not really matter since it was never reached. Ever since demand for the H-2B began to be reached in the mid-2000s the cap of 66,000 is something that is continually regarded by employers and industry groups as a key flaw in the program. For most employers and the agents who help them to navigate the process, the competition with other employers is a constant battle to secure enough visas for the upcoming season. Almost

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every human resources director I spoke with who used the H-2B reported instances of rejected applications due to the cap having already been met. These moments are typically met with frustration and panic in facing the prospect of being shortstaffed during the upcoming season. In practice, while 66,000 may be the official cap total, in most years with high demand congress has found itself extending the cap in one way or another after intense lobbying efforts from industries that rely on the H-2B. One has been the returning worker exemption that allowed H-2Bs working over the past three years to return without counting against the cap. In other years this exemption has been allowed to expire and instead an emergency extension has been added to allow for more new applicants. Unfortunately, these extensions are often tacked on mid-year and are either too little or too late for tourism employers. Natalie related just how this affected them when congress revoked the returning worker exemption in 2016 only to later add the cap extension: Even though the cap was at 66,000, with this returning worker exemption the actual number of H-2Bs coming in from out of country was much larger, because as long as you’ve been there before you could come back. You weren’t taking up one of those slots. Right after he was elected [Trump] but before he took his seat, there was this language in the bill for the returning worker, and Paul Ryan decided to pull it out of the bill. They passed whatever this bill was that has a bunch of things, but it didn’t have the returning worker exemption. Now we are stuck with the 66,000 for the year . . . . What happened with that is that we didn’t get our employees. Eventually, I think it was in May, they extended this piece of legislation that approved I think 15,000 more visas, and we did apply for our workers, and we actually got in that time, which was awesome. We just got people in July versus April, but our true need date is March. You can imagine, and then they come in July 1 or come in on 4th of July. At least we had them for a portion of the year. I think that year, no, that was the year that it took many months, we didn’t get them until the end of August, early September. That was even later. We had missed our busiest season, which is the summer, and we only brought so many because really at this point some of our operations aren’t even running. It was just a different year. That year we did end up getting a smaller amount for the tail end of the year. The following year it was a lottery again, because they didn’t renew, they haven’t put in the returning worker exemption, so there was a lottery again. We did get a portion of our workers, but we didn’t get all of our workers . . . It’s been funny. They’re releasing additional visas, but it’s too late. You’re missing out on a portion of your business. They really do recognize the need for it, but they haven’t done any permanent long-term solution, which is frustrating. We were running into that same thing again this year.

If there is one thing that businesses crave, it is a lack of surprises. However, the legislative construction of the H-2B program has for some time prevented businesses to plan with any sort of regularity concerning their ability to onboard temporary foreign workers. The labor markets in the various industries that utilize the H-2B seem to have shifted yet the will to create long-term political solutions leave the program one which is in a state of constant crisis that requires annual legislative band-aids in order to function. If one of the theoretical roles of the state is to serve to grease the wheels of capital, lately it is lacking in lubrication. The divisiveness of the topic of guestworkers programs, and immigration in general, has only served to prevent real

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efforts to build broad political consensus toward fixing many of the inefficacies and precarities currently baked into the H-2B pie, something that receives more attention in chapter eight.

Housing (again) One issue stands to truly unite the experiences of employers in discussions of J-1s and H-2Bs: housing. As noted in previous chapters, the lack of adequate workforce housing is a major contributor to the labor shortages in seasonal tourism areas. For employers, this creates a compounding problem. Not only does scarce workforce housing lead to recruitment difficulties of non-existent local domestic workers, but also creates a conundrum since the same inadequacies make it difficult to house international guestworkers once they arrive. To make matters worse, adding them into the pool of workers who are seeking to find housing close to their site of employment only creates more pressure on an already extremely tight housing market. While neither the J-1 nor the H-2B programs require that employers provide housing to international workers, in practice, many have found that they have been forced to do so based on their local circumstances. In some cases, hotels and resorts are well suited to provide accommodation spaces on their properties or nearby. Resorts often either purchase or lease apartments off-site where they can house their workers and from which they can provide round-trip transportation. This was the case at Stuart and Kylie’s ski resort in Jackson, Wyoming. Prior to Stuart’s retirement, he had spearheaded the action on the part of the company to build and obtain other housing for their workers and as a result 156 beds are spread across three different properties available to employees for rent. At the time of the interview a little over half were rented to J-1 workers, while the rest were used by domestic employees. Although they were made available to workers, they were not rented for free and due to the extremely high costs of housing in Jackson, were relatively expensive, a fact which Stuart and Kylie acknowledged but defended: Kylie: And so we subsidize it quite a bit, and even our prices for housing is a lot more than other employees in different areas are charging, but we’re still cheap for the area. So sometimes when we go out to recruit people, like sponsor companies are like, ‘Could you reduce your housing costs?’, and I’m like, ‘I can’t.’ And so, a couple of years ago, we found it tough to fill all of our positions and everyone loves to come to Jackson, but the housing is just . . . Stuart: And what’s important to know on that subsidies, subsidy is not only the monthly rent, the biggest part of the subsidy that we do are the shoulder seasons when we have nobody in there. So that’s where if we could fill them 12 months out of the year, we’d be pretty good, but we’ve got two months in the spring and two months in the fall if they’re just sitting there.

These accommodations mostly averaged around $600 per month depending on the quality of the rooms. In reality, this cost, while more expensive than similar

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accommodations in other locations such as Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where a similar arrangement would cost roughly $400, Kylie is correct that this is generally more affordable than other properties they do not control. Both Kylie and Stuart felt fortunate to be able to provide this housing as a large employer and could not fully grasp how small “mom and pop” employers in Jackson without similar ability could make the visa programs work for them. These sort of conversations were the same in virtually every location where I had spoken with employers. From the mountains of North Carolina and Wyoming to the beaches of South Carolina to the gentrified towns of Cape Cod and Nantucket, managers had to contend with figuring out ways to secure housing not only for their guestworkers, but for their domestic seasonal staff as well. It has become a constant source of stress, forcing human resources professionals to also act at times like landlords. Yet, while the lack of affordable workforce housing is a headache to management, for workers the problem is altogether more acute and more personal. When housing options are so limited, and competition for accommodations so fierce, it serves to heighten the precarious nature of work far from home in a place where you are a merely a guest.

7 Precarious Work – It Takes a Village Migrant workers are valuable. Their mobility gives them an ability to fill in holes in labor markets that might otherwise go unfilled. They allow local employers a spatial fix to a problem that may be intractable without moving production elsewhere. In this way, their ability to be present commands great worth to employers, but they are also valuable because they are vulnerable. When labor migrants come from impoverished countries with high unemployment, they work harder knowing that their ability to send money home to families depends on keeping a job and working as many hours as possible. Many have also incurred debts from labor recruiters simply to procure the job. These things serve to make them motivated employees and well regarded by even those employers who utilize their labor with the best of intentions. But labor migrants will often accept levels of mistreatment and exploitation that would never be tolerated by local resident workers. When domestic citizens with bad intentions begin to understand that there are people in their midst from whom they may take advantage, the precarities inherent in being a migrant fully blossoms. As strangers to the places where they travel to for work, they are often unfamiliar with the local language, local customs, local norms, and their rights as workers or the services that may be available to assist them. All of this is modified based upon immigration status, be they authorized to work or not, and the rules that govern their stay in the county. All of these are true of J-1 and H-2B workers, simply as a condition of being foreign labor migrants. Precarity is part and parcel of moving across borders to perform work, even when systems are designed to reduce vulnerabilities. But precarity is also spatially contingent, and the circumstances found in one place play a large role in how they are manifested. When J-1 and H-2B workers enter into an area, how and where they find themselves vulnerable may take many forms, from locals who are trying to sell them unneeded extra services, utilize them for nefarious purposes, or sell them housing that is inadequate or overpriced. Sometimes it is in the nature of the jobs and how the visa requirements are structured, but others may find local actors as a pillar of support whose altruism serves mitigate the risks they feel as guestworkers. How active these and other support institutions are locally can play a large role in how successful a visa program can be.

International Student Outreach Programs Not long after Memorial Day in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the first of many J-1 orientations begins at a local church along Highway 17 close to the heart of town. As the start time approaches, young people on bikes begin to materialize and students begin to trickle in to take their seat on pews that area usually filled with parishioners on Sunday morning. Before the orientation begins a variety of languages and accents https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-007

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can be overheard mingling together in the din of the large open space. Eventually the presentation begins as a variety of members of the local community take their turns introducing themselves and welcoming the students to Myrtle Beach. Each in turn offers a bit of information on services, safety and local norms that will be helpful for them to know as they navigate this new home for the next three months. A local police officer takes the microphone to make students understand traffic laws, the importance of crossing at intersections as pedestrians, and how bicycles are to be ridden in the local area. He also offers advice on protecting valuables and their passports, how to avoid scams, to travel in groups, and the best ways to contact help in an emergency. He also pauses to ask the students in the audience if they trust the police in their own countries. When many acknowledged a collective distrust, he reassured them that in United States police are professionals and will only help and never demand bribes. A fire department representative next takes the stage to talk about housing rules and safety. They are followed by someone from Coast RTA who provides details on the local bus system. A worker from the local crisis center explains a list of their free services, followed by closing remarks from a representative of one of the many J-1 sponsor organizations. In the lobby a variety of other organizations public and private have tables where representatives and volunteers pass out more information on services available to them. At the conclusion, any student who has come to this orientation should have an adequate understanding of basic life in Myrtle Beach. While Myrtle Beach has been welcoming SWTs in large numbers for several decades, this orientation and the grouping of organizations that take part have only come together to provide collective support in the past decade. Prior to that time all J-1s came to Myrtle Beach with only the minimal directions given to them by their sponsors who may or may not have had local representatives to meet and assist them face-to-face. The result was a growing assortment of foreign students working throughout the peak season who were all subject to the vagaries of the local situation, some coming away with a great experience, others subject to poor housing, graft, and unsavory work. As locals in Myrtle Beach came to realize not only were these students all around them, but they were repeatedly victims of bad landlords and petty criminals or worse, they began to galvanize themselves into a group that could make their foreign guests feel safer and more welcomed in their own community. A similar story can be told throughout the United States in many seasonal tourism towns that have become reliant on SWT labor. Indeed, a survey of the cultural landscape of guest work in U.S. tourism would be incomplete without acknowledging a mediating force that contributes to the unevenness of how precarity is felt from place to place: International Student Outreach Programs (ISOP). Unlike H-2B workers who toil away hidden in plain sight, foreign students working in many areas where they have clustered in the United States in high concentrations have garnered attention of local citizens who have taken it upon themselves to welcome and support J-1s in their communities. These community support groups take various shapes consisting of a myriad of local people and institutions with the

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goal of providing assistance as well as cultural outreach. Often these ISOPs are affiliated or managed by churches whose members do most of the volunteer work. In other places, they may involve civic institutions like police, fire and safety departments, and even program sponsors and employers. Sometimes the ISOP operates on its own, but works with civic institutions, sponsors, and the like to provide a means of coordinating support. The mix of people and groups involved is unique to each location, but all have emerged rather organically in response to the recognition that so many foreign students were in their midst and that in many cases they could use some help dealing with significant difficulties living in the United States. The types of assistance offered, and the level of local coordination displayed by each ISOP necessarily varies. At times they provide certain services like low-cost bicycle rentals, picking up and dropping off students at the airport, or coordinated travel to and from Social Security offices. The latter is important because students may not begin work until they have applied for their social security number from Social Security office locations that may not be near the place of work or even connected to local public transportation networks. For example, every Wednesday an ISOP in the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg, Tennessee, area had been providing transportation to the Knoxville Social Security Administration office in a church van because no other public transportation is available, and it was not provided by the program sponsors. Additionally, ISOPs often provide cultural programming that gives J-1s more exposure to Americans and American culture. Multiple ISOPs around the country host communal meals or social gatherings such as the “All Nations Café” held weekly at a Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, church that offers free food, music, and games amongst J-1s and local community members. Several others in different locations host an annual “Thanks-o-ween,” a portmanteau combining Thanksgiving and Halloween, in a celebration that gives J-1s an experience of two iconic holidays that take place in the United States after most students have returned home. The most active community groups provide these sorts of events throughout the peak season, while others with a limited number of volunteers may do so more sporadically. ISOPs are also an important source of advocacy in the places with the most active and dedicated volunteers. Often they learn about problems with housing or work before anyone else and have occasionally taken it upon themselves to intervene with landlords, employers, and sponsors on behalf of J-1s. This was the case in Destin, Florida, where Sylvia, a local volunteer in charge of her church’s community outreach began her work assisting SWTs after seeing news reports of a young Bulgarian woman who had been killed by an intoxicated driver while riding her bike to her second job at a grocery store. Despite knowing very little about the J-1 program, Sylvia and her church decided to organize a welcoming event for the SWTs as well as a memorial for the deceased Bulgarian student. It was through these meetings that students began to open up to Sylvia and other volunteers and express the challenges they were facing:

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And what we found in 2012 is that there was a whole group of students stuck at a hotel, Motel 6. And they were maybe eight to a room, literally eight to a room. Where some would work different shifts so they would share beds, guys and girls together. Kids that didn’t know each other, they had just met each other on this trip to the United States. We knew nothing about this group of students really. And we found horrible conditions where kids were left in hotel rooms for six weeks. And then we found other challenges with employers. Employers didn’t know the rules, such as their work hours can’t be from 11 to 7 in the morning . . . the majority of their work hours . . . . that’s regulation for employers. So we found that employers just found the opportunity to hire these students. And they’re hard, hard workers, whereas American students might not sit out in the sun for 10 hours, these guys will and they have no problem with it. I truly believe that the biggest issue with the J-1 students is the employers understanding rules and what the responsibilities are and the sponsor here in the United States understand what their rules and responsibilities are and the sponsor back in the home country. In 2012 I didn’t know any of these sponsors existed. These kids were just lost, they were in horrible housing situations. And once they got housed into a condo it might be that literally 12 students in a two-bedroom apartment with two baths. So we started becoming an advocate for these guys. And I brought kids into my home. I had four Chinese girls and two Chinese boys come live with me during that summer, and I still stay in contact with those kids. I love those kids, they’ve gone on to do great things.

Another volunteer, Nikolai from the ISOP in Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, found his interest in helping students by similarly talking to them and finding out more about their struggles: Well basically I spoke with a couple of them, asking their experience, and they said, Terrible. And they started to share with me all the trouble and complications and challenges they have being away from home. And you know facing all the difficulties. They usually come from nice homes and they have these ideals of the United States they get from the movies. And they end up living in roach motels and in all these drug communities. So I thought that’s really terrible so that’s what for the first time I thought it could be really nice to help these guys to experience what we experience, which is nice communities.

From community to community these sorts of stories are consistent, and only the mix of local actors varies. Sometimes it is the business community or civic institutions that take the lead instead of private volunteers or church groups. Because these groups are invested in the wellbeing of SWTs it is not a surprise that the State Department has been pleased to see them emerge over the past decade, to the extent that they list almost 30 different ISOPs across the country with links to their websites or Facebook pages on the BridgeUSA program website (Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs – DOS, n.d.). In many cases, the Department of State actively works with these groups when they learn of them, in part because it provides a level of oversight over the program, sponsors, and employers. Also the cultural programming they often provide serves to strengthen the cultural exchange elements of the J-1 which helps to shore up the program in light of criticisms that it is merely a work visa in sheep’s clothing.

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In terms of oversight, the most active ISOPs do have a significant impact in the places where they operate, even if they may not be a panacea to all the ills associated with the visa. As watchdogs they provide valuable insight into how and when the programs fail to achieve their goals and how students can find themselves in vulnerable and abusive situations. Without a doubt the biggest issue that ISOPs and other advocates for guestworkers identify is the sticky problem of housing, or the lack thereof.

“Housing is the Biggest, Biggest Problem” If at this point, housing feels like the common denominator linking so many of the labor issues facing seasonal tourism areas, that is because it is. As countless isolated and gentrified mountain towns, ski areas, islands, and beach communities continually demonstrate, the dearth of affordable workforce housing presents a massive dilemma for employers who cannot find workers who increasingly live elsewhere, and/or must figure out ways to house any seasonal workers they have brought to them. The erosion of affordable housing options places a great deal of stress on lower tier workers who cannot compete for space with wealthy residents or tourists. Added to this is excessive second home ownership which even further adds to housing scarcity and serves to place many people in even more precarious positions as the most vulnerable segments of local populations experience displacement and relocation (Biagi et al., 2012, p. 645). But this precarity also extends to those workers who have been dropped into the middle of this scramble for living space, which only makes an already overtaxed workforce housing market even worse. With the best and most accessible short-term housing options either out of reach due to inflated prices or unavailable because they are set aside for tourists, seasonal workers join the competition for whatever remains. At best, what does often remain is less than ideal. At worst, what is left over is wholly unacceptable, dangerous, expensive, and unhealthy. For ISOPs and other groups that serve to advocate for guestworkers the question of housing is paramount in the struggles that they witness. Ben, a church group volunteer who helps to run the ISOP that serves Virginia Beach, Virginia, described the spatial isolation that constricts the supply of housing in the immediate area where students work: Housing is absolutely the biggest struggle for the students in our city, and it’s just obvious reasons. You know they come in 1,400 or 1,600 strong and we’ve got a strip area, a boardwalk area that’s only maybe ten miles where they work. So they’re cramming in for sure. Every once in a while they’ll get stuck a few miles away from their job, but they’re all concentrated at the ocean front at the poorest section of the ocean front. There’s a full spectrum of housing here. There have been some improvements because of all the complaints. So the hotels, tend to do the best job. Some of the hotels will actually house their students if they are employed with them. The rest are like rental houses and small apartment complexes and a lot of them have

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arrangements to clear out for the summer so the students can live there. I mean it’s quite an industry . . . We’ve heard horror stories of six or eight students in a single room sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Those kind of stories do come out.

Ben’s description of J-1 students clustering in particular low-rent sections of town is very similar to what can be found in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, located just over 350 miles to the south of Virginia Beach. In many ways they share similar characteristics as a coastal community stretched along many miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Myrtle Beach is an even larger recipient of J-1s every year with between 3 to 4,000 arriving in the summer months before the COVID-19 pandemic. While students do find accommodations in a variety of locations up and down the strip, a good portion of what is available to them lies in an area of town that was part of the original heart of Myrtle Beach tourism during its “Golden Era” from the 1950s to 1970s. Most of the original motels that served the drive-in tourists that came with interstate expansion were eventually demolished to make way for the large multistory condominiums and hotels that now line the beach. But many of the smaller motor inns located across the waterside Ocean Boulevard and set back two or three blocks are still standing. In a nine-block stretch running from the open field that was the old Pavilion amusement park but is now home to a zipline attraction southward to the current Family Kingdom Amusement Park lie many of these relics of Myrtle Beach’s past. A quick drive around the area reveals several tired, old budget motels and apartments and a feeling of a place long past its prime (see Figure 7.1). Most of these motels are not the sort of places that most family vacationers would choose if given a choice. Many of the online reviews would be comical if one did not feel so bad for the people that opted to stay there. Some of them are written by SWT’s warning others not to stay there. The most generous thing that can probably be said about what can easily be described as a “J-1 Ghetto” is that is centrally located close to many of the businesses where the SWTs are working. This area of Myrtle Beach is well-known to the local police force, which was revealed during a ride-around tour of the beach community areas by Officer Hill, a career police detective and key figure among the consortium of institutions that comprise the local ISOP. Officer Hill has spent a great deal of time working with J-1s and helping them deal with their problems and the people that prey on them, and as a result has become a keen observer and critic of the SWT program as it exists in Myrtle Beach. He regularly attends orientation meetings and keeps a close eye on the status of housing for the SWT’s and the various types of ways that unscrupulous landlords have taken advantage of the students, often amounting to crowding too many students into rooms that are much too small: Housing is the biggest, biggest problem. Because it’s the height of the season, any decent place is already (rented). The hotels, they need this program more than anything else. But we don’t have the housing for it. They’ll put, like one last year did, in a two bedroom, two bath, they put 11 kids in there and charged them all $90 a week. And that’s just, just wrong.

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Figure 7.1: Two typical motels in the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina “J-1 Ghetto.” Source: Photo by author. Many older hotels in the area just north of downtown Myrtle Beach house J-1 Bridge Program SWTs in the summer. Students will often sleep four people to a room with only two beds and no kitchen. Many of the rooms are subject to frequent bedbug infestations. They typically receive the lowest possible ratings from vacationers on travel websites. Due to the problems seen in the past, motels in this area are closely watched by local law enforcement.

Furthermore, while crowding is an ongoing issue, especially as it breaks fire code regulations, so too is the overall low quality of the rooms, some of which are rented out at the cheapest possible rates during the offseason and not properly cleaned prior to the arrival of students: All these kids you see, 1/3 of them will have bedbugs by the beginning of June. Because off season, all these low-end motels, Columbia, New York, all the surrounding municipalities, when people get out of prison . . . where do you want a bus ticket? Myrtle Beach . . . so you can rent this in December, January, February for $30 a week . . . . you know what the quality of human being is who’s renting that for $30 a week in December and January. Hence the bedbug problem and all the other problems.

Ron, who manages a large hotel on the beach close to the J-1 ghetto reflected on the bedbug problem, “some of them were so nasty you didn’t want your employees staying in them and bringing whatever with them to your hotel.” His further comments and tone suggested genuine concern for the welfare of the students, but he also could not help but tie it to the impact on his own business if SWTs proved to provide a vector for an infestation. While the J-1 ghetto in Myrtle Beach is certainly problematic due to the low quality of the motels, from a law enforcement perspective the high density of students

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living there also helps the police to identify where students are living and which places are the most problematic: So what we try to do is vet the slumlord, AKA manager of the place and say, you know if the room occupancy is full, it’s gotta be four kids in the room, we strongly recommend (security) cameras. We want you to make sure the locals aren’t hanging out abusing them. We want you to have security on property. Are we overjoyed with where they’re living? Well at least we can have a relationship with them [the landlords]. I don’t know if you can appreciate that we’re in a really shit neighborhood?

While never one to sugar coat his feelings about any aspect of the J-1 program, Officer Hill did acknowledge a level of success that the J-1 outreach had netted both in establishing closer connections to landlords and also in developing an ongoing property management task force that coordinated the efforts of the fire department, building code inspectors, and the police department. Yet, with only 190 police officers and a proportional number of other safety officials to handle a town that swells to over 400,000 at any given time in the summer, there is a limit to how much enforcement and oversight can be expected. In informal interviews with dozens of SWTs in Myrtle Beach many did report satisfactory living conditions, but a sizeable minority also reported living in situations that would horrify most parents of university-aged students. Many students did indeed report living with too many other SWTs. Others reported unsanitary living quarters with roach and/or rat infestations. In one particular case, a student produced a cell phone video of an apartment with a ceiling falling through due to massive leaks and a bathroom replete with a mold and mildew problem that went beyond the need for household cleaners. But even for students who were living in situations that were legal and within fire code regulations, many SWTs are typically living for several months with at least four people sharing only two beds in a typical motel room. Many must inevitably share beds with other SWTs they have never met or choose to sleep in shifts. And if they find themselves in an old motel rather than an apartment, they can expect no proper kitchen and must instead rely on microwaves, hot plates (which are likely not within fire regulations), and a lot of fast food. One must question whether such living conditions could really coincide with the best intentions of the J-1 programs to support cultural outreach or backfire spectacularly. Unfortunately, the quality and availability of housing is not the only problem associated with workforce housing shortages in these guestworker dependent seasonal tourism towns. Another is that lack of available adequate apartments for rent creates an opportunity for unscrupulous actors to prey on foreign students in other ways. According to Officer Hill, one common problem was seen in landlords who would withhold housing deposits, “and then brag that they don’t give the deposit back because the kid is back in Moldova.” In such situations, the student is very unlikely to never see their money returned.

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Foreign workers are also particularly vulnerable to housing scams in work locations experiencing the most housing stress. In areas like this, it is advisable to have housing arranged before arrival in the United States or face the prospect of homelessness upon travel to the worksite. Yet, arranging housing from afar requires a great deal of trust that the potential landlord is acting in good faith that the property in question is actually one they control. One particular type of scam like this targeting SWTs was witnessed by Cape Cod restaurant owner Gabe and his manager Natasha: Gabe: There’s been a handful of situations of fraud, which is like somebody just putting up a picture of a house online, even though it’s not their house, and renting it to kids who show up here, and the house doesn’t exist. It’s not theirs . . . I’ve seen houses that are like, ‘God, I see this house for rent all the time.’ And then like, it turns out 12 different people rented it. And it’s not even a house that’s available for rent . . . . Or it’s another house where, I saw we had one situation, that house up at Five Corners, where people were shown the house by a guy who just knew where the key was and knew the people weren’t there. Show the house, get the deposit, and then he took off. When they show up later, they can’t get a hold of anybody, can’t get a hold of a key. They can’t get a hold of anything. And then, they’re going door to door, like, ‘Can I live here?’ And they’re like, ‘No.’ Natasha: It has happened where like they knock on people’s doors (J-1s asking for rooming), it’s a crisis. It’s a crisis.

Nearby on Cape Cod, Bill, a long-time volunteer with the consortium of organizations and churches that comprise the Cape Cod and Nantucket ISOP described his efforts to help prosecute a local man who had been involved in a similar scam. I was the head of the Human Rights Commission for many years . . . one of our things, our case load in the summer was big time with the kids, with J-1. We had a case in Orleans, and I knew the man, I had two friends who knew him, we got him arrested. We got him a jail sentence for this. He was demanding deposits and not delivering and sending them false photos. And I saw the photos. I knew where the photos were from. They weren’t where they should have been. I knew how he was taking the money. I watched it happen. I knew the guy. He’s a big drug dealer in town anyway. So, I was able to be really helpful in pulling him down, but it took two or three years, and it took enough kids cooperating and being willing to testify. So, yeah, things happen, but it’s unconscionable how these scums survive, how they can live.

Typically, when local housing solutions are not readily available in a normal context, people are simply left to search farther from their place of work and rely on a longer commute. While this may be an acceptable solution in many places for resident workers, for guestworkers in tourism areas, the prospect of a longer commute is often unfeasible or undesirable, especially as most do not have access to private automobiles. Thus, in a select number of places like the island of Nantucket or Jackson, Wyoming, the relative isolation matched with a severe shortage of workforce housing makes commuting almost impossible. In others, foreign workers who live far from their jobs must rely on either bicycles purchased or rented after arrival or

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on whatever local public transportation options are available. However, as previously noted, another solution that some sponsors and employers have utilized is to shuttle workers between a distant location and the worksite. This is seen in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where some SWTs were bused either from older motels on the opposite side of the island or from nearby Bluffton which lies just off-island across the bridge. While the physical conditions of these accommodations appeared to be an improvement over closer but run-down apartments and motels, living further away presented the prospect of isolation and less time to engage with other aspects of American culture outside of work. Such a scenario works well for those on the H-2B, but is questionable for J-1s who are in the country for the purpose of cultural engagement. H-2B workers find themselves in the same local context, and while they technically have the freedom to find their own accommodations employers are often advised to facilitate housing workers prior to their arrival. Due to the tight housing markets noted in the discussion above, most of the employers interviewed provided some form of housing to workers and all of the H-2B workers were living in employee-contracted housing. Among the workers, housing tended to be their chief complaint. I had the opportunity of visiting and spending time with Jamaican H-2B workers in both Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Once again, the heavy competition for living spaces play a hand in allocating the less desirable housing to guestworkers. On Hilton Head island, H-2Bs are clustered in one of the last remaining pockets on the island with any available low-income housing. In fact, this particular set of apartments known as Chimney Cove Village was originally built by a resort called Palmetto Dunes in the 1970s to provide housing to its own local hospitality workers. The owners continued to rent these units at below-market rates for the next 30 years to low-income residents as they slowly fell into disrepair. New owners, local hoteliers themselves, sparked minor controversy in 2016 when, after purchasing the property for $3 million, evicted around 40 low-income Mexican resident families to make way for larger resorts to house their H-2B workers (Lurye, 2016b). While they saw this as a means of upgrading the units and serve the needs of larger hotels who needed living quarters for international workers, others saw them as robbing housing from local workers in order to further supplant them in the workforce. Chimney Cove is set back from the major divided highway that circles the island, well out of the view of motoring tourists. When I visited, the owners were in the process of upgrading the buildings. Dumpsters and gutted units were scattered about, adding an extra layer of disrepair to its existing run-down appearance (see Figure 7.2). At the time, the chief complaint among the Jamaicans who lived there was the $450 monthly rent each person paid to live there, in a place they found to be of lower quality than their own homes in Jamaica. Today the dumpsters are gone, and the simple pre-fabricated units are fully renovated and provide adequate if not luxurious accommodations.

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Figure 7.2: Chimney Cove Village Apartments. Source: Photo by author. The Chimney Cove Village is one of last remaining low cost housing areas still available on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Most if not all are now rented to H-2B workers who work at nearby resorts. These were under renovation when I visited but the workers who lived next door were not pleased to be living in a place they felt was not worth the cost they were paying at the time. The renovations have since been completed.

In Myrtle Beach, the apartments that workers allowed me to tour are within walking distance of their jobs but in accommodations that were clearly too small, even if within legal fire code regulations (see Figure 7.3). In one example, six adult Jamaican women of ages ranging from 20s to 50s lived in a two connected former hotel rooms that shared a kitchen and bathroom. These provided scarcely enough space for beds, seating, and storage, although this did not prevent the women from keeping typical blue remittance barrels in the room to be filled with consumer goods and shipped home. Aside from the limited space, the cost was problematic for the women. At $95 per week, paid to the employer who was only in turn paying them the prevailing wage of $8.85 per hour capped at 36 hours, the cost of housing easily exceeded the commonly accepted threshold of affordability (30% if one’s income). This cost is in line with what J-1s also pay for their rents in Myrtle Beach, however, in the H-2B program workers are forbidden from working for multiple employers and thus could not earn extra income from a second or third job. Their employers at the hotel across the street would not allow them to work more hours, ostensibly to prevent from having to pay them overtime wages. Taken together, housing for both J-1s and H-2Bs presents a particularly ongoing source of vulnerability. And indeed, Glenn, an attorney who has specialized in assisting J-1 and H-2B workers in claims against their employers and sponsors identified housing as the single biggest issue that he sees year in and year out:

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Figure 7.3: H-2B Apartment Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Source: Photo by author. Three Jamaican H-2B workers lived together for eight months in this hotel room. With very little storage space they room had become very cluttered with their clothing, toiletries, and other sundries. Also pictured are several barrels that the women were filling with consumer goods and other necessary items to be shipped back to Jamaica; it is a reminder of the poor economic condition of their lives at home and the people that they are attached to that give them the motivation to do the work that they do. We get the most calls about that. Again, because you don’t have to pay them the prevailing wage. Usually most J-1 employers are paying people the minimum wage. We don’t often see cases in which people are earning less than the minimum wage. It happens, but the biggest thing is that workers are paying a bunch of money for employer-controlled housing that’s really bad. And we get constant calls about, ‘It’s not in a safe place. I don’t have any transportation, so I have to walk to work and it’s not safe.’ Or, ‘I have to ride a bike at night and it’s not safe because of where the housing is,’ and things like that. I’m not sure what the solution is to that problem, but the housing for J-1 workers, it’s a big deal. And I think folks have an idea in their home country, they’re going to come over and gonna have a fun summer, it will be a great experience, a great adventure, and they’re like wow, I’m living in this roach infested apartment with six other J-1s and we’re paying this much money a month? That’s crazy . . . . you get a certain understanding of like well this is what’s it like to be a low wage worker in the United States. I guess that has some cultural exchange value to it, but I’m not sure it’s what the state dept. wants to portray is the best of the United States.

(Legal) Aliens vs. Predators In Wisconsin Dells, which annually welcomes the largest number of J-1 SWTs in the state, members of the community outreach group have been particularly concerned about security at housing locations where they have some control. Cary and Tom, both of whom work to manage a large resort and local attraction that employ J-1s also happen to be members of the local Village of Lake Delton board of trustees. In

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this role they have been deeply involved in managing the flow of student workers to their community. As such, they have a seen first-hand how vulnerable the young foreign students can be to local Americans with bad intentions who look to take advantage of their vulnerability as migrants temporarily in the U.S. They described this as the main reason that access is relatively tight at some of the dormitories where SWTs spend their summer: Tom: You saw when you went over there, we are very security conscious. Because we don’t want . . . we’ve had incidences where you know people from Milwaukee or Madison or Chicago come up here and you know they are trying to prey upon these kids Cary: Offer them a third job in Chicago . . . . Tom: . . . Offer them a third job in Chicago and then all of a sudden you never see them again. So we are cognizant of that and our police department is so proactive on that area. The crime rate here has not elevated much at all. And I talked to our police chief when I knew I was going to talk to you. I asked if there is any difference between the theft at Walmart with J-1 students vs. regular Americans. He said no, we have more problems in the last week before the kids are going to leave with kids taking from roommates. But law enforcement is a key component. These kids have to feel as though they’re safe.

To this end, much like other SWT heavy areas, the ISOP in Wisconsin Dells holds regular safety workshops and also maintains a J-1 liaison official whose sole purpose is to interact with the students and listen to their issues. The efforts appear to be paying dividends as the chief ongoing complaint these days seems to be about the speed of the internet connections. Other areas of the country without such a strong ISOP, active civic presence or in communities much larger and less cohesive than in Wisconsin Dells-Lake Delmont, tend to be more fertile breeding ground for predatory behavior. Officer Hill in Myrtle Beach had a great deal to say in this regard, where the ISOP group deliberately switched their orientation meetings away from the convention center to the local church in part to ward off locals. But here he found much more sinister activity to report beyond the occasional cab driver who would take students on longer routes in order to garner a bigger fare. He was much more concerned about a couple of foreign mafia groups, especially Armenian and Russian, that would utilize local businesses that catered to international students with web access, bike rentals, and other services to extort Eastern European SWT’s. According to him, the criminal groups would use the businesses to collect information on the students and then threaten violence against their families in places like Ukraine if they did not pay them. He did note, however, that although they have been unable to prosecute the mafia groups for these activities, that they have made their police presence visible and uncomfortable leading two out of three to close in the past few years. Aside from extortion he also described how these groups were also involved in attempting to coerce Eastern European SWT’s into prostitution by promising them

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extra money as models, only to later place them in vulnerable situations and compel them to perform sexual acts. Because these stories are only anecdotal, and unverifiable due to the difficulties the police forces tend to have in making cases against trafficking it is difficult to know just how pervasive such problems are in Myrtle Beach or across the country. But similar types of activity have been associated with the J-1 program in the past, especially prior to major changes made by the State Department after 2011. Some of these involved criminal organizations in the Northeast that had fraudulently used the J-1 visa as a means of trafficking young women from Eastern Europe to work as exotic dancers. More recently, in 2016, Federal authorities prosecuted a Florida man who had been promising young women work in a yoga studio as assistants, only to force them into prostitution from his apartment (Dale Consulting & Dale, 2021; Medige & Bowman, 2012). While sex trafficking has been implicated in rare instances, labor trafficking in general is a particular concern between both the J-1 and H-2B visas. Labor trafficking is defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2020) as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.’ One recent example of a set of federal human trafficking lawsuits made in 2018 by several Jamaican and Filipino H-2B and J-1 workers alleging abuse from an Oklahoma couple that employed them in their restaurant and hotels and that paid less wages than promised, over charged for recruiting fees, and gave the workers fewer hours than promised. Furthermore, in the case of the J-1s the plaintiffs were also sponsors, thus creating a further level of coercion since any complaints about jobs were being handled by the owners themselves (Legal Aid at Work, 2018). A recent and perhaps even more impactful case emerged in the summer of 2021 when Federal authorities indicted several people involved with a company called Grandeur Management Inc. that provides a host of services to hotels and resorts including linen and laundry, housekeeping, maintenance, and a number of other consulting options. The indictment charges the owners and managers of the company with several crimes such as wire fraud, visa fraud, and money laundering. The allegations include luring workers under false pretenses on the H-2B visa, charging inappropriate fees, underpaying workers, giving fewer hours than promised, and lying about living conditions. The indictments came after several years of investigation and include dozens and perhaps hundreds of victims to be named later (Weissman, 2021). Grandeur has been utilizing the H-2B for over a decade. In 2010, the company had been certified for 35 housekeepers. In 2020 and 2021, it had been certified for 90 housekeepers in both years. As of writing the company remains open, and whether or not the company faces debarment by DOL remains to be seen. Interestingly, this is not the first time that the company has been accused of misdeeds against workers. It was also the subject of complaints filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in 2016 on behalf of several J-1 students from the Dominican

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Republic. It was also subject to another lawsuit filed by a couple of Filipino who accused the company of luring them from their jobs in South Dakota while on a J-1 with false promises of extending their stay and converting the visa to an H-2B. The company never actually filed the H-2B paperwork and instead kept the Filipino workers in the country illegally while they told them not to look for other employment. That Grandeur Management was still able to be certified by DOL despite these credible instances of abuse suggests that the effectiveness of existing rules meant to protect workers is worthy of great scrutiny. Of course, while it is one thing to have strong regulations that protect local workers, foreign workers and even employers from abuses of the H-2B program, it is another to enforce them. In 2020, the DOL Office of the Inspector General (OIG) produced a report on its audit of its own enforcement performance, finding the department wanting in its debarment processes. This audit was undertaken due to ongoing concerns “because prior OIG investigations have shown foreign labor programs are susceptible to fraud and abuse by dishonest immigration attorneys, employers, labor brokers, and organized criminal enterprises”(Pallasch & Stanton, 2020, p. 1). The report also added concerns over employers misusing their programs to participate in exploiting workers for economic gain by engaging in human trafficking. Normally, the Employment and Training (ETA) and Wage and Hour Divisions (WHD) have broad authority to respectively audit employers’ compliance of the terms of Foreign Labor Certification and investigate and enforce actions when employers violate the rules. When ETA audits and WHD investigations DOL reveal a substantial violation, it is required to debar the employer, which prohibits them from further sponsorship of any immigrant on a temporary visa for 1–5 years. Indeed, from Fiscal Years 2015–2018, of the 27,425 H-2B applications that were certified, ETA audited 1,354 or 4.9%. These audits resulted in 22 debarments. Despite these actions, OIG found that the criteria used to determine which employers to audit was not risk-based, and thus was likely missing some employers that were deserving of debarment. This could possibly help to explain why Grandeur Management in Myrtle Beach was continually certified, although it is uncertain. Ultimately, the OIG recommended that going forward, risk factors and data analytics should be used to determine which H-2B application were most in need of auditing. ETA responded positively to this critique and has subsequently agreed to develop a risk-based selection approach including input from various other agencies, a process still being developed during 2021. It is to be seen whether these changes will net positive gains towards identifying and sanctioning bad labor market actors, but the attempts at reform speak to the fact that the agencies involved take their roles seriously despite whatever shortcomings they and others have identified in the structure of the H-2B program.

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Forgive us our Debts The recent changes to the auditing identification processes are a continuation of tweaks to the management of the H-2B program that have taken place over the past decade. In 2012, the Obama administration DOL implemented a host of new regulations associated with the program aimed at strengthening protections for both American workers and H-2B workers (Preston, 2012b). Many of these were slight changes to application process or clarifications on existing rules others were changes to definitions (DOL, n.d.). Several represented major changes that attempted to reduce the vulnerabilities faced by migrant workers, meanwhile shifting costs associated with the program to employers, something that served to drive some employers away from the program and to embrace the J-1 instead. One example was a simple definitional change that recharacterized full-time work from 30 hours to at least 35 hours under the new rule. Others were specific in attention to reducing recruitment and travel costs for the worker. These included strengthening prohibitions on any recruitment fees that a worker would be required to pay to anyone at any time in the recruitment process. Workers would also no longer pay for any visa-related expenses, any equipment required to do the job, or their transportation to and from the worksite, unless leaving voluntarily before the end of the contract. Other changes to pay added additional protections, such as stipulations that workers be paid at least every two weeks and that they be guaranteed at least three quarters of their total expected earnings in the event that they are dismissed early. Many of these changes were directly aimed as stripping away pre-employment precarity associated with debt that has been so historically endemic in international recruitment. A report by the Centro de Los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), a migrant worker advocacy group found that at the time almost 60% of workers coming to the U.S. had paid recruiting fees and that almost half needed to take out loans in order to cover the various costs, sometimes using their own land as collateral (CDM, 2013). One stark example of this came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina where a New Orleans hotel had brought in 290 H-2B workers from Peru, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic, each of whom paid between $3,500 to $5,000 to recruiters. Considering their relatively low earnings, several months of their time in the U.S. would have been required to pay the loans they had taken to cover fees, and when the employer failed to provide them with full-time work, many were forced to sell land and other belongings (Hahamovitch, 2011). By reducing the financial burden of going to work, the hope would be that workers would no longer need to secure loans from banks, family members, or other private citizens and place them into a state of indirect debt peonage that makes them less apt to assert their rights or to leave a bad job. Limiting travel costs and visa-related fees are steps that should continue to have direct impacts. Furthermore, by outlawing recruitment fees levied by the employer, a recruitment agency or anyone employed in the process of recruiting workers, H-2Bs

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should theoretically never be in a position to pay someone in order to secure their employment. And this is the case when a foreign worker happens to find themselves recruited by a reputable employer and agent. Despite these best effort attempts to stem abuse in the system, there is clear evidence that the practice of forced bribery is nevertheless persistent. The problem resides in the chain of recruitment when employers rely on third parties who in turn rely on local actors with personal connections to the places where they recruit. Isabel, an attorney who has worked as an advocate for migrant workers for several decades described how this plays out in an informal system of kickbacks and indirect payments that manages to cleverly skirt the regulations: What we have seen in Mexico is that there will be recruiters . . . by recruiters, I’m not talking about the white, blue eyed person that goes into the Mexican village saying, ‘Hey, I have jobs in the U.S.’ They will be Mexican. The recruiters will sometimes be Mexican. Most of the time they’re Mexican themselves, that have been hired by these agencies because they may know the pueblos. They may know the villages, the communities. And then they are told like, ‘Okay, these are the jobs. And we need X amount of workers.’ Right? And so then the person will go and either post it on Facebook, word of mouth, and that’s pretty much how stuff happens. It’s pretty much the same recruiter or a family member of that recruiter. They have a lot of power because . . . I don’t know . . . if the recruiter’s family has a little store that sells groceries, or they’re engaging in some type of business, it’s kind of like, Hint, hint. If you want to go to work in the United States next year, then you need to buy from that business Or support that business. But you’re not paying the recruitment fee. No, you’re not paying a recruitment fee . . . So there are other ingenious ways of making this money, right? And what that means, though, if you, as a person living in this village, and the one recruiter that comes into your village to recruit for these jobs in the United States with a particular employer and a particular business, then you really don’t have an option of exploring other jobs, right?

Isabel continued to explain that each village will typically have only a small number of recruiters or even only one who may arrive looking for workers, limiting the options that potential migrant workers feel they have if they want to access a job in the United States. So many end up playing along with the bribery schemes. Furthermore, even once employed, single powerful recruiters who control access to foreign work still maintain a looming presence that prevents workers from asserting their workplace rights for fear of being blacklisted. Yeah. So then what happens is, if the person becomes a problem employee, that recruiter will not hire them again. And word will get out that X person from X place is not a good fit. And people won’t get hired. And we know plenty of workers who, they raised a complaint about something, or something happened, and that’s it. They don’t get to be in the program anymore. So when workers do decide to raise a complaint about something, it’s pretty much knowing that they’re not going to get another job. It’s going to be nearly impossible.

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Isabel’s last point helps to explain why advocates and law enforcement institutions often have such a difficult time making cases, since they often rely on workers who will be willing to speak out. Most will only do so after their possibilities for work have already been exhausted. The problem is further compounded by the fact the fact that H-2B workers who have been subjected to recruitment bribery are often coached in how to respond to questions about the payment of fees during their interviews at the United States consulate. When asked by U.S. consular officials about recruiting fees, if a worker responds “yes,” the visa will be canceled as it would be in violation of the regulations, regardless of the fact that they were not the party at fault. “So then, what’s the response going to be to that question 99.9% of the time?”, asked Isabel, further suggesting that this means the government, nor the employer end up knowing that the workers did indeed pay for their recruitment. Coaching their employees on how to respond to the question of fees while charging their employees for recruitment was one of the allegations listed for Grandeur Management in Myrtle Beach. The fact it was discovered and they could be indicted perhaps lay in the fact that they had been acting as both employer and their own agent in the H-2B process and were operating in the United States, which made their crimes easier to detect. When this happens outside of the United States with third parties, preventing recruitment fee abuse is much harder. Guestworkers incurring debt in order to travel to the United States is not always related to unethical or criminal behavior on the part of those looking to take advantage of guestworkers. By design, the J-1 program requires that students pay for their own travel to the worksite in addition to various fees charged depending on each individual sponsor and the country of origin. For students that arrive from poorer countries around the world, sometimes the only option is to incur debts up front with the goal of paying for the travel during the three months in the United States. Even with other reforms and with ISOPs in places to help satisfy cultural exchange aspects of the J-1, debt is something of a more sticky problem with high fees baked into the program. In Wisconsin Dells/Lake Delton this was something that Tom had identified: One of the problems I think is surfacing now, and I’ve talked to enough kids so I know how much money they spend to get over here. I talked to a waitress over at our place, they have one J-1 student. Of course, she tells me she’s staying at the Wilderness dorm cause she’s got a full time job there. I asked what did it cost you to get over here. And she says, oh about $2,000 dollars. And I didn’t know how it can ever get controlled. But so much money goes to the sponsors. It’s just sinful. It’s $350 plus $350. That’s $700. That takes care of their visa fees. You have the insurances included in that, so that’s what it costs. Now why are these kids spending $2,000? So I asked them, why would you come over here and spend $2,000? She goes, ‘because I can’t find a job in my hometown and my family got $2,000 together and I’m trying to make as much money as humanly possible. If it means I’ve got to work three jobs, I’ve got to work three jobs.’

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It should be noted that the $2,000 fee does not include transportation to Wisconsin. It is also notable, that these fees are actually on the lower end of what can be expected. Many Chinese students who I met in places like Hilton Head were routinely reporting closer to $5,000. It is not at all surprising that many SWTs elect to work multiple jobs while in the United States. For many it is the only way to make enough money considering that they are typically placed in positions that earn close to minimum wage.

From Sweet to Sour Altogether, the sort of vulnerabilities described here have become the reason that several advocacy groups have spearheaded efforts to reform both the H-2B and the J-1 programs. Their arguments were given greater teeth in 2011 when a group of about 400 J-1 students who had been working at a warehouse in Pennsylvania packing Hershey’s chocolate decided to go on strike in protest of their poor working conditions. Besides their low pay, the SWTs were doing jobs that subjected them to workplace injuries as they were forced to work at breakneck pace in order to meet quotas that would net managers a performance bonus (Maitra, 2012; Preston, 2011a). Through all of this they were awarded with a total lack of cultural interchange. Needless to say, paying thousands of dollars to secure a job that mostly taught them what it was like to be a member of the working poor in the United States did not sit very well with them as a group. Despite complaints to whoever might listen, each layer in the chain of businesses associated with their employment continued to deflect responsibility to each other. Technically, while packing a Hershey’s product, they were employed by a subsidiary of German supply-chain management company Exel. Only the year prior, Hershey’s had dismissed its unionized workforce, instead opting to subcontract that portion of its operations to Exel. For staffing, Exel turned to a staffing agency, SHS Onsite Solutions, who in turn relied on J-1 sponsor Council for Education Travel, USA (CETUSA) to supply them with SWTs. To add insult to injury, when the SWT continued to press their concerns, they were threatened with deportation by the plant managers. With no one to turn to and upon learning that they were paying more for their housing (which was deducted from their paychecks) than other locals living at the same apartments, the students decided to walk out. They were supported in publicizing their plight by the National Guestworker Alliance that had previously advocated for H-2B workers who had been dealing with similar condition after being brought to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a six-month campaign, they successfully managed to bring shame to the U.S. Department of State and the J-1 program, that quickly led to major changes to the J-1 programs and to DOS removing CETUSA as a sponsor of the Summer Work and Travel program (Maitra, 2012; Stern & Kravitz, 2016). The acting deputy assistant

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secretary of state at the time described the decision to ban CETUSA, “after the fivemonth investigation revealed a ‘scope and severity and pattern of noncompliance’”(Preston, 2012a, p. 12). In 2012, DOS issued new regulations that significantly updated and expanded upon changes that were already in the process of being updated in 2011. In their ruling, DOS specifically referred to the Hershey episode, and it is clear that many of the new rules were addressing the sort of abuses that it had laid bare. For example, many industries were expressly prohibited from using the SWT program, including manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and construction. Sponsors were also dissuaded from placing students in positions that have been associated with human trafficking, and should only do so with extra caution, going so far as to specifically acknowledge housekeeping and janitorial services within this group. Restrictions were also placed on the placement of SWTs at staffing agencies, unless they could directly be controlled on site by the staffing company. They also disallowed placement in jobs with working hours lying primarily between 10 PM and 6 AM. They further clarified that sponsors are fully responsible for recruiting students and that third parties who work with sponsors to identify and screen participants must be fully vetted each season to ensure they are working within the rule and aims of the program. Other provisions included stipulations that SWT work must be seasonal and not displace American workers, that they should not be geographically concentrated in clusters, and to reaffirm that sponsors must check in with participants monthly and also ensure that they receive cultural programming as fitting the aims of cultural exchange. The final rule also acknowledged the housing issue: “If it is difficult for sponsors to identify appropriate housing and/or transportation under certain circumstances, this should signal the sponsors to search for other jobs in other locations.” The provisions concerning clustering and housing raise important questions as to why SWT’s are consistently found clustered in locations that are notoriously short on housing stock to this day. Two other important steps were also taken at the time. The first was to place a moratorium on the admittance of new sponsors for the SWT program until the existing ones could be fully evaluated. The second was to place a cap of SWT participants at 109,000 which was based on the total of participants during 2011. This number was significantly fewer than the 153,000 SWTs in 2008 before the recession. Both changes were intended to be retained, “until it is confident that the program regulations are sufficient to remedy identified concerns.” After almost a decade these remain in place, and although the total number of SWT’s peaked at over 108,000 in 2019, it never exceeded the cap. The number of sponsors for the SWT program, however, did fall from a total of 49 in 2011 to 38 in 2021. It is unknown if DOS will elect to open applications for new sponsors in the future, but for now it seems that the worst actors have now been weeded out according to most ISOP and industry leaders I met over the past few years. But because so much responsibility falls on the sponsors as the ones solely responsible for the students, they are certainly continually worthy of scrutiny. This is especially true considering that as the

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total number of sponsors has fallen the total number of participants has risen, creating a heavier burden of managing more student workers, each which must be in contact at least monthly.

More Vulnerable. By law! Aside from the fact that most of the jobs that guestworkers on the J-1 or H-2B visa are doing are lower status, lower paid, and seasonal, the structure of the visas themselves can be problematic in creating unfavorable working conditions. Some of this is built directly into the rules of the program. The H-2B in particular features a couple elements that guestworker advocates have identified repeatedly as sources of vulnerability. One is that because the H-2B application process requires a potential employer to first prove their need and then petition the government to sponsor particular workers for a specified job to be done, the worker is effectively tied to that one employer. This places the worker in a precarious position in the case of workers who find themselves in a poor working situation. Whether they find they are doing different work than promised, end up working fewer hours than expected, working in unsafe conditions, or anything else that would normally lead them to leave an employer, they are limited in their options. For the most part, their only recourse is to return home, as they are not legally permitted to work for any other employees; their work status is based on the employer proving their need. This means that they are also not allowed to work for any additional employers by holding an additional job. The hours they are given by their employer is what they are stuck with. The lack of total hours and difficulty of accomplishing the work in the ones they were given was one of the chief complaints I found among a group of three Jamaican housekeepers working in Myrtle Beach at a major resort next to the beach. Each was working about six hours, six days per week. After beginning their shift at 9:00 AM, they were expected to clean up to 16 units, most with two or three bedrooms. This left them with just under 25 minutes to clean each unit, a task they found extremely difficult to accomplish and which forced them to work at breakneck speed. One of the Jamaican women expressed that each day presented an exhausting toll, “I’m just as tired after working six hours as if it was a full day, but I have to do it for six days.” Despite the exhaustion that the job represented, they could not reach 40 hours in a given work week based on the daily schedule and were never allowed to work more so that the company could avoid paying them overtime wages. With a wage of only $8.85 per hour, the 36 hours they were granted to work netted them relatively little compared to what they could work if they were allowed to do more. One of the women among this group of housekeepers was particularly frustrated by the hard work and lack of hours and was verbally suggesting she may leave the program altogether. Yet, despite her frustrations, in practically

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the same breaths, she admitted that the prospect of actually returning home was unlikely; her family was counting on the remittances she was sending home to Jamaica. In the span of a few sentences, her words had neatly illuminated the theoretical conditions regarding the connection between migrant work and precarity. Here were workers who were desperate to do hard, physically taxing work, the kind of work that others in the local community were not willing to do at similar wages, and they desired to do even more. Despite the privations of their existing employment in the U.S., they predominately wanted to work as many hours much as possible in order to maximize their time and justify the sacrifice of being away from family. It was not a surprise that one of the women was visibly frustrated, describing the whole situation as “foolish” when they come from abroad and due to high cost of housing, low wages and limited hours were barely making enough to send home. The experiences of these three women illustrate the legal basis for how mobility is both enabled and constrained by the state to facilitate the access of employers to labor that exists beyond borders. In the case of the H-2B, the regulations associated with the visa itself are instrumental in mobilizing foreign workers by granting access to employment in the United States. Yet at the same time, its regulations serve to keep workers tethered to a single employer in a particular place, as their authorization to work and the calculation of the prevailing wage is based upon specific needs in specific places in the United States. These provisions keep workers immobilized spatially and figuratively within the local labor market and effectively erodes their ability to negotiate their positions (Bauder, 2006). In essence, the workers that come to the United States on an H-2B visa are given two very stark choices. To work or not. If the work is hard, if it is unfavorable, unfair, or if they have been lied to or forced to pay a bribe to secure employment, they have every right to leave and return home. But to return home means they forfeit the opportunity to work, a prospect that motivates them to stay and accept situations that would be (and repeatedly have been) rejected by local workers. Many guestworkers do not see much of a choice in this scenario. The massive global inequalities that place them in a position to be actively seeking work abroad do so in a way that compels them to leave. There is irony in the fact that poverty and lack of work at home combine with guestworker programs to mobilize workers, while ultimately a lack of mobility once arrived and working in the United States makes workers more vulnerable. The system is a fountain of precarity that only runs dry when the political economic situation between countries no longer stand in such sharp relief. While on one hand the current regulatory framework of the visas themselves create some of the vulnerabilities that temporary foreign workers absorb in coming to the United States, it is not the only source of precarity. Another is that despite their contributions to the economy of the United States, most non-agricultural guestworkers are not afforded the same level of access to legal mechanisms of protection found in U.S. courts as their domestic counterparts. This is due to the fact that H-2B and J-1 workers are not allowed to be represented by organizations that

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accept funding from Legal Services Corporation (LSC). Established in 1974, LSC is an independent non-profit corporation that receives congressionally appropriated funding ($415 million in 2019) in order to provide legal assistance and access to justice to low-income Americans. LSC supplies various legal aid programs with funding that allows those who could not otherwise afford lawyers in cases associated with family law, housing, consumer issues, disaster response, and employment/income maintenance, the last of which accounts for about 15% of LSC cases. Among employment cases, those involving agricultural workers account for the vast majority, about two-thirds of all cases (Lim et al., 2019). Interestingly, many of the agricultural employment cases that have drawn on Legal Services funding have been involved with H-2A workers. Since the establishment of the separated H-2A visa in the 1986 immigration law, agricultural workers remain one of the few exceptions of foreign temporary workers who may access LSC funded assistance. Without this access to legal aid the likelihood of guestworkers affording a private attorney in order to secure legal support is greatly diminished and the option of seeking a legal remedy in courts is drastically reduced. In fact, the cost associated with litigation is the specific reason that the U.S. Congress appropriates funding to LSC in the first place. It is one of the primary vehicles that the federal government has in order to close the “justice gap” and provide some relief to the civil legal needs low-income people, 80% of which go unmet (Diller & Savner, 2009). Guestworker attorney Glenn, who works for an organization that provides legal assistance to J-1 and H-2Bs, and has been a primary advocate for regulatory improvement of both visa programs, acknowledges that with a limited number of privately-funded attorneys, enforcement of existing regulations becomes a challenge: So that leaves it to us, as the private enforcers to go out and enforce these regulations. We’re not bound by any appropriations rider that says that we can’t use our money to enforce the regulations. They regulations still exist, but you’ve taken away the police power of the state to actually enforce the regulations, so it’s left to private folks like us to do it, and there’s just not enough of us. Because you’ve also restricted the ability of the Legal Services funded legal aid organizations to represent H-2B workers. You take away DOL from enforcing the regulations, you take away legal services from being able to enforce the regulations, and so you’re left with a handful of us who have the funding and the wherewithal to actually enforce it. And so people are like ‘wow, when am I gonna get caught?’

The appropriations rider that Glenn refers to references a long legislative history informed by lobbying efforts of employers that bar most foreign nationals living and working in the United States from accessing legal assistance provided by attorneys and firms that accept LSC funding. On one hand, the legal framework of LSC funding serves to reinforce the foreign “otherness” of guestworkers, but at the same time is part of a larger political struggle between ideological divides in the United States that is broader than one focused solely on temporary labor migration. It is part of the questioning of the role of the welfare state and its place in assisting the well-being of its citizens. The H-2B and the J-1 just happen to be one part of that bigger political game.

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Similarly, guestworker visa programs remain facets of a multitude of political activities existing in various places and at multiple scales within the United States. Often this is centered on the visas themselves as they are by their very nature political constructions. In this way they are continually contested and shaped by political actors. Other times, the H-2B and J-1 are tangential to specific politics of the places where guest work has become a central part of the economic life if only because those politics often inform the very reasons that guestworkers have become the backbone of the local labor markets. Sometimes political action is one based on local and personal advocacy and sometimes it is wrapped up in international geopolitics.

8 Politics and Immigration Reform On the Multiscalar Nature of Political Action The political terrain over which issues associated with guestworkers visas arise stretches across multiple scales. The visas themselves are creations of legislation at the national scale, their very names J-1 and H-2B taken from the U.S. Code of Law in which their provisions are embedded. They are contested and shaped by nationallevel political forces and country-wide lobbying efforts that affect all workers, employers and places where guestworkers are found. But it is also at the local scale where J-1 and H-2B workers find themselves in the midst of community political efforts to manage the impacts of the visa programs, or to mitigate the forces that make them such a ubiquitous presence in the places where they cluster in the first place. Because they involve international flows of people, they are also implicated in global or regional politics. This is certainly the case with the J-1 visa as it was created as a tool for international diplomacy. Sometimes the programs may be used for international diplomacy, but with a goal of helping to solving a domestic political crisis, such as has been seen with recent efforts to reserve some H-2B visas for workers from Central America’s Northern Triangle. The goal of this chapter is map out some of this contested political terrain at multiple scales. While it is impossible to provide an exhaustive account, especially of local scale political actions, these cases serve to shed light on the complexity of the forces shaping guestworker programs. Furthermore, they help to further illuminate how seasonal tourism-dependent areas are shaped by political forces that are either responding to guestworker programs or to the particularities of their local situations such as housing shortages and gentrification. If one thing can be said of guestworker programs, it is that they are controversial. For as many that argue they are necessary for the maintenance of a healthy economy, there are others who suggest they distort the economy and the labor markets into which the workers are thrust. In truth, there are few topics in American political discourse where the far left and far right find themselves in agreement. However, in the case of the J-1 and H-2B, both ultra-conservative and leftist politicians present a shared disdain for the visa programs. On the issue of displacement of American workers at the expense of low-paid, exploitable foreign workers, both speak in remarkably similar terms. Regardless of the political allegiance or viewpoint presented by those individuals and organizations that hope to affect policy changes regarding guestworkers programs, it is clear that action must be made at the national scale. While the structure of the U.S. Constitution grants a good deal of power to individual states to regulate businesses, educational systems, among many other things, the rules and regulations that govern work visa programs are determined in Washington D.C at the federal level. This is something with which all stakeholders associated with the H-2B and J-1 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-008

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visa come to realize quickly when they hope to ensure that the programs are governed in a way that lines up with their industrial or ideological perspectives. For example, employers are acutely aware that if they want to see guestworker visa programs align with their needs, they must garner the attention of legislators in Washington. Of course, for this there are a number of organizations that represent the interests of seasonal tourism businesses, such as the United States Chamber of Commerce and various hospitality groups. But at times, employers and human resources managers have the opportunity to directly lobby their representatives in attempts to make them understand their position and the necessity they feel for maintaining guestworker visas. Hotel owner Ruth from Jackson, Wyoming, related a story of just how close of a relationship she had and how well known the issue of the H-2B program was to her senator at the time: I just had a note from my senator, Mike Enzi, and Mike said he been so busy. preserving those programs. I still go to DC, but for taxes, pass through tax issues. In fact, I called him the other day . . . Isn’t it something in Wyoming I can talk to my senators and representatives! And he said, ‘Oh I thought you’d be calling about the usual H-2B program.’

Whether it was close relationships to business owners, or a general affinity for human resource issues (which apparently Senator Mike Enzi held during his time in office), it is clear that he was responsive to Ruth’s, and others’ appeals (Gurchiek, 2021). He was one of many senators who would sign letters asking for extensions of the H-2B visa cap during his final years in office. Other human resource managers had similar stories of lobbying congressional representatives, but with less of a feeling that their concerns were being understood, as Sarah, the H.R. manager from coastal South Carolina felt in speaking with her state’s representatives: I’ve been to DC, I’ve met with Lindsey Graham, I’ve met with Tim Scott, and I’ve met with a slew of other state senators and representatives. A lot of the challenge is really they don’t understand the program. the H-2B program. They don’t understand. They do speak that it’s taking away from American jobs, but if they really truly understood that it was a seasonal job, that it’s a temporary seasonal job. Really they don’t understand. Some of them do, but a good number of them really, truly don’t understand the program. Really we have to rely on them to actually get it done. You’re constantly going into these offices and trying to educate them about what it is and why you as a business are asking for it. We’re a small business that needs this in order to do the business that we need to do. It does affect other people. I mean, it affects U.S. jobs. What happens is when I don’t open a restaurant for dinner, what happens to those full time U.S. workers that were working in that restaurant for dinner? . . . I also think a lot of these representatives don’t understand about the program is there’s rules, and they’re auditing these things and ensuring that you are qualifying. It’s not like any hotel can get approved for this.

Despite her frustrations both of the senators she named have a track record over the past couple of years of supporting efforts to ensure or enlarge employer access to foreign guestworkers. Lindsey Graham, in particular, had actually been a member of the so-called “Gang of Eight” bi-partisan group of senators who had proposed a

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comprehensive immigration reform bill that included reform and expansion of guestworker programs, and a form of amnesty for undocumented foreign nationals that likely would have benefitted tourism employers greatly. This was a bill that passed the Senate handily, but it failed to even receive a vote in the House of Representatives at a time when that body had been dominated by the Tea Party Movement, the populist wave of conservative activists and politicians that emerged at the time in reaction to Obama presidency and the passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Although somewhat amorphous as a movement with some divergence in political positions, it focused heavily on reducing the power of the federal government, taxation, environmental protection, and was generally hostile to any notions of amnesty for undocumented workers. The political climate that had emerged and later exacerbated in the Trump era was one in which bi-partisanship has been made almost unfeasible. With this in mind, it is not a surprise to see employers like Sarah and their lobbying groups frustrated by legislative efforts that have generally served as stopgap attempts to shore up the H-2B visa rather than provide them with regularity and certainty. Similarly, Craig shared his own personal perspective as a manager of a Western North Carolina golf resort on how politics governs how politicians react to guestworker programs: I know that the politicians like to say that we don’t want to be taking jobs away from Americans. I’m here to tell you, I haven’t taken one job away from an American by doing this. Because you’ve got to be in the trenches where I work, where it’s impossible to find help. And, unfortunately, the politicians do not do that. They do what’s going to get them elected. They have no idea what it’s like in the real world here. I would like to see some change to the program. I know that you can’t, that you have to have control, that you can’t just let people stay here endlessly. I get it. I don’t know what the solution is, but there aught to be some sort of a visa review that allows them to remain and extend them for a second three-year period, then you go home. I think that would make it easier and give more continuity to people like me. I could get my employees back more years in a row. And as you know in my business, the more returning employees you have the more consistency you have all the way across the board, it’s more efficiency.

People working in seasonal industries, like Craig, ultimately understand that the way that guestworker program are shaped is political in nature and that the only means by which his needs can be satisfied is with action taken by politicians at the national scale. But he does not have to like it. The same is true for those working to seek change in order to better protect workers. Attorneys and legal advocacy groups fighting for migrants’ rights that accept funding from Legal Services Corporation (LSC) are particularly familiar with how national scale politics impact their efforts to protect many foreign individuals. Since its inception in the 1970s, LSC has been the target of politically and ideologically motivated efforts to either restrict or enlarge its mission. As noted in the last chapter, LSC plays an extremely important role in closing the “justice gap” by providing funding for legal services that serve lower income people in the United States.

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Because it represents publicly funded efforts to curb inequalities in the justice system it has been embedded in the overall push and pull between the left and the right side of the political spectrum. In the late 1970s, LSC was targeted by the groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the major insurer and lobbying organization selfdescribed as the Voice of Agriculture®. Former LSC Chairman Douglas Eakeley later described this as “the most virulent of our foes” (Eakeley, 1997). Due to the fact that LSC funding supported legal efforts to help migrant farm workers assert their rights it was seen as a threat to growers who were unhappy to see their labor force assisted in making legal challenges against them. By the early 1980s this effort saw LSC funds prohibited from being used to assist illegal aliens, later extending to other legal-nonimmigrants by 1983, although the H visas received an exemption and were allowed to be represented with LSC funding. However, in a twist of irony, considering the power of groups like the American Farm Bureau, when the H-2A program was split from the H-2B in the 1986 Immigration Act, it took with it the ability to have LSC funds used to defend guest farm workers, but only with regard to complaints directly associated with their labor contracts rather than their immigration status or other issues related to their rights. The H-2B and most other non-immigrant visas were conspicuously excluded from being represented with LSC money. It is difficult to find specific information why the H-2B was not afforded the same protections, but speculations are that at the time, Congress intended DOL to eventually model rules based on the H-2A rules, and that due to the fact that it was rarely used initially, it did not seem urgent (Forest Service Workers, 2006; Knudson & Amezcua, 2005). Regardless of the reasons, from the very beginning of the H-2B program, non-agricultural guestworkers were given fewer protections from abuse. The limitations on LSC support for guestworkers was further increased in the 1990s. After a reaching its zenith in 1980 after the start of the Reagan administration, LSC had been subject to withering political attacks from funding cuts to appointments of people hostile to the LSC mission to its board. By the 1990s it had survived and experienced something of a resurgence with the Clinton administration in 1992. By the 1994 mid-term elections, when Republicans swept back into power in Congress, a new conservative agenda emerged with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” This legislative agenda focused on reduced government spending, regulations, and renewed emphasis on promoting businesses and entrepreneurialism. This included pushing tort reforms to provide curbs on the power of citizens to sue in courts for damages. But congress also contributed to a yawning justice gap by not only cutting funding to LSC, but also as a result of “extreme and ill-conceived funding restrictions imposed on legal aid programs by Congress in 1996” (Diller & Savner, 2009, p. 688). In the budget appropriations bill of that year, Congress saddled LSC with a host of checks on what it could do. Among the most damaging of these rules was one which disallowed any firm that accepts any LSC funding from representing guestworkers (other than H-2A), even if the funds to do so were provided from a separate private source. In effect,

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LSC funds could not support any aspect of the overall organizations engaged with protecting undocumented or migrant guestworkers in any way, even indirectly by assisting with infrastructure or organizational administration. The impacts have been significant. Attorneys that might otherwise decide to represent H-2B workers inevitably must decline to do so when contacted for help. In such cases, the workers are left with very little recourse due to the inability to afford representation on a private basis. Furthermore, by placing barriers on legal advocacy, congress also effectively prevents some of the feedback they would otherwise receive about guestworker programs because those issues are not being raised in courts (Diller & Savner, 2009). Despite these prohibitions, advocacy groups won a small victory in 2008 in an example of why lobbying efforts at the national scale are so important to protect workers on the local scale. In that year, congress created changes to the LSC prohibitions on funding for H-2B workers by passing an exemption specifically for forestry workers. Isabel, an attorney who has long worked to defend migrant worker rights with a non-profit agency that worked directly with guestworkers to educate them on these rights, described how a particular congressperson decided to sponsor legislation to open LSC funds to those working in that conspicuously dangerous portion of the H-2B sector only after an exposé on the plight of H-2B workers doing forestry on public lands: The forestry worker exemption came about, it was included as an amendment in the appropriations bill of 2008, I believe. 2008. And what led to that was a series of articles published by the Sacramento Bee. It was an outcry. ‘We know about these forestry workers and their really poor working conditions and the abuse.’ And then a senator from New Mexico, I forgot his name, but a senator from New Mexico at the time said, ‘Well, we can do something. We should do something.’ And they pushed forward this change to allow forestry workers in the H-2B program to get legal aid, but nobody else. Not the H-2B program as a whole, just this very specific group of workers because there was a political will to do so.

But that political will did not extend to helping housekeepers, maids, cooks, landscapers, or any other number of non-immigrant guestworkers who remain more invisible in jobs that were deemed less dangerous or prone to abuse. Of course, that does not mean that abuse does not happen and when it does, even today those workers have very few options. Elmore (2007, p. 552) best describes the impacts of this lack of concern: “Given guestworkers’ lack of information about how to find counsel, language and educational limitations that prevent them from representing themselves pro se, and their lack of funds to hire an attorney, preventing guestworkers from obtaining free legal services virtually bars them from litigating claims in the court system.” The fact that it took congressional action to make meaningful impacts for H-2B forestry workers suggests the necessity of appeals to national scale politics. For example, Isabel also acknowledged the necessity of action at the level of the federal government:

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Like I say, it’s a complicated mess. As advocates, we have to aim at all of these agencies, right? Because so many different federal agencies touch on these programs. So it’s not like we could just direct our advocacy at one agency. For example, we have to talk to Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, the Department of Labor, the NLRV, the EEOC. Our transition memo, just last year, we put together a comprehensive recommendations report for the incoming administration. And it’s a lengthy document that has recommendations to improve the programs. And these recommendations touch on so many different agencies, right? So one of our goals is to encourage the administration to have an interagency task force that looks at the programs as a whole, not just with a piecemeal lens.

This sort of lobbying effort at the national scale is a necessary form of action for any group that hopes to affect policy change. But as Isabel notes, these efforts are not only directed toward congressional representatives but also toward executive branch agencies that are in charge of administering guestworker visas. Depending on the way that the legal framework is established that gives agencies the authority to make rules and regulations they may have more or less leeway to administer as they see fit. Furthermore, the executive branch agencies also work for the president and thus will typically reflect the political ideology and positioning of whichever president is in power.

Not Letting a Good Crisis go to Waste While in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, on June 22, 2020, the Trump administration issued a proclamation suspending several guestworker visa programs. Most press coverage immediately identified the H-1B visa for highly skilled foreign guestworkers in their headlines announcing the suspension. The H-2B, J visas and L visas were generally treated in headlines as “other visas.” This makes some sense as the H-1B has long been among the most publicly controversial guestworker visas. Among the J-1 visa categories affected by the suspension were intern, trainee, teacher, camp counselor, au pair, and of course, the summer work travel program. An exemption was made for health care workers who would obviously be fighting the disease, but also conspicuously absent from this group was the H-2A visa used for agricultural workers. The proclamation, also made exceptions for, “any alien seeking to enter the United States to provide temporary labor or services essential to the United States food supply chain.” This language would suggest that H-2B workers serving, for example, in seafood processing positions like crab picking, could still be allowed to enter the country for work. In total, the proclamation was initially estimated to keep up to 525,000 temporary foreign workers out of the country at least until the end of the 2020 (Shear & Jordan, 2020). In the proclamation, the Trump Administration stressed that this was a measure aimed at alleviating undue foreign competition for jobs during a public health and economic crisis:

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In addition, pursuant to Proclamation 10014, the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Homeland Security reviewed nonimmigrant programs and found that the present admission of workers within several nonimmigrant visa categories also poses a risk of displacing and disadvantaging United States workers during the current recovery. American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States to perform temporary work. Temporary workers are often accompanied by their spouses and children, many of whom also compete against American workers. Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered temporary worker programs can provide benefits to the economy. But under the extraordinary circumstances of the economic contraction resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, certain nonimmigrant visa programs authorizing such employment pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers. For example, between February and April of 2020, more than 17 million United States jobs were lost in industries in which employers are seeking to fill worker positions tied to H-2B nonimmigrant visas. During this same period, more than 20 million United States workers lost their jobs in key industries where employers are currently requesting H-1B and L workers to fill positions. Also, the May unemployment rate for young Americans, who compete with certain J nonimmigrant visa applicants, has been particularly high – 29.9 percent for 16–19 year olds, and 23.2 percent for the 20–24 year old group. The entry of additional workers through the H-1B, H-2B, J, and L nonimmigrant visa programs, therefore, presents a significant threat to employment opportunities for Americans affected by the extraordinary economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. (Proclamation 10052, 2022)

Despite arguing that the proclamation was only made in response to the COVID-19 crisis, the move fell in line with the political position on immigration that President Trump and his advisors had been trumpeting since his election in 2016. Organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that have long openly called for restricting immigration expressed their immense pleasure in press releases and interviews with the media. CIS Executive Director Mark Kirkorian admitted being pleasantly surprised that the White House had not allowed industry lobbyists to water down the measure in order to appease industry groups, “I was sure there would be some sort of guest-worker suspension, but I also expected that the ban would be riddled with loopholes and carve-outs demanded by the Swamp” (Kirkorian, 2020). In particular, he was surprised that the au pair program was among those suspended because in his analysis that is a visa used by wealthy Americans (particularly those with influence in Washington D.C.) to find cheap childcare and thus shape the order to their needs. Other groups reacted differently to the order. Because it included the possibility that the suspension could be extended beyond the end of the year (ultimately it was extended until March 31, 2021) it was immediately met with either great suspicion or outright condemnation from groups opposed to increased barriers to entry into the country. At the time, many felt that the Trump Administration was simply using the pandemic as a means of enacting the agenda largely influenced by senior advisor to the president Stephen Miller, who had been the principle architect of

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Trump’s anti-immigration policies, including the controversial decision to separate children from parents of asylum seekers at the U.S. border with Mexico. Such was the position of the American Immigration Council, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and that responded with accusations that the stoppage of the guestworker programs was motivated by politics rather than concerns over public health or the economy (Germanos, 2020). The critics had reason for concern. At various times during Trump’s time in office, his administration had floated the possibility of ending or imposing severe cuts to the J-1 and the H-2B. Even before he had received the Republican nomination for president in 2015, he had signaled that if elected he would cut the J-1 visa (Mulraney, 2015). In April 2017, a few months after his inauguration as president, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13788, “Buy American and Hire American,” that called for a review of immigration rules to protect the interests of domestic workers. In August, widespread reports emerged that the SWT and internship programs had emerged in discussions for possible elimination. The uproar among communities and industries that had become dependent on the J-1 program became deafening. Organizations like the National Ski Areas Association, the Alliance for International Exchange, The American Hotel and Lodging Association, International Association of Amusement Park and Attractions, U.S. Travel Association, and a host of local or regional tourism and hospitality groups all began lobbying the U.S. Congress in support of maintaining the J-1 program. By merely hinting that it might, the Trump administration had, “galvanized the resort industry in an all-hands-on-deck campaign to thwart Trump’s anticipated cuts to the J-1 program” (Blevins, 2017). A bi-partisan group of senators and representative from states with the heaviest concentration of SWTs including North Carolina, Maine, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Maryland penned an open letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson encouraging support for the program. 163 former U.S. ambassadors to other countries similarly encouraged Congress to block funding cuts to the exchange programs that were also proposed in the Trump administration’s budget proposal. Ultimately, no actions were taken to curb the J-1 by the executive branch. However, legislators decided to go one step further to protect the J1 visa by inserting a special provision into the 2018 fiscal year budget that restricted the use of funds appropriated to the Department of State for running the program to in any way modify it (Sec.7034. (e)). Rather any changes must be made through a formal rulemaking process with regular notification procedures to the Appropriations Committee and time for public comment. This created a legal barrier for the executive branch to unilaterally make changes to the program, one that has been maintained in every congressional budget since. The level of concerted bi-partisan political action further suggests how engrained the J-1 SWT, intern, and trainee programs have become in the past couple of decades. From the perspective of the tourism and hospitality industries and the places where student workers concentrate, it is practically untouchable politically. Considering that a president whose political identity and

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fortunes rested on a foundation of reducing both legal and illegal migration declined to touch the J-1, suggests as much. It is in this context that the halt to guestworker visas in summer 2021 created such a stir. Many simply feared that policies that could not be pushed through in regular order were being introduced through a sort of Trojan Horse wrapped up in emergency orders on public health grounds. If the emergency provisions were to last and if Trump were to win the 2020 election, then perhaps they could become a de facto normalization of cuts to cultural exchange guest work. The point became moot however when Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 and subsequently allowed the non-immigrant visa ban to expire on March 31, 2021. While those who strongly support the J-1 programs breathed a sigh of relief, resulting backlogs at U.S. consulates around the world ensured that summer 2021 would be a year with high demand and many fewer J-1s.

H-2B The J-1 was just one of many guestworker visas for which Donald Trump had long maintained a public ire. He also displayed particular vitriol for the H-1B, which under his presidency faced intense scrutiny following the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order. The visa for workers in high-skilled occupations experienced a dramatic uptick in denials of initial visa applications as well as for returning workers; meanwhile the administration created new arbitrary rules in an attempt to force H-1B wages well above local prevailing wages in an attempt to make hiring Americans much more attractive (S. Anderson, n.d.). This move was in line with an overall shift in political winds that also saw a bi-partisan group of legislators (including more liberal Democrat and more conservative Republican) senators forwarding legislation to reform the H-1B. One particularly comical case of a senator quickly changing his policy views on the H-1B in order to capitalize on anti-immigration political sentiment was seen with Ted Cruz (R-TX). In 2013 Cruz had sponsored legislation that would have increased the annual number of H-1Bs by 500%, only to reverse course and sponsor an anti-H-1B visa bill two years later in a naked attempt to politically position himself for a presidential run in 2016. It is in this context that Trump and his staff came in to office riding a wave of anti-immigration sentiment with a mind to utilize the power of the executive branch to affect major changes to guestworker policy. Yet despite Trump’s avowed aversion to guestworker visas in general, he remained virtually silent on the H-2B. Perhaps most telling from the earliest portion of his presidency is that it was conspicuously absent from the draft version of the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order that specifically addressed the other major non-immigrant work visas: B-1, E-2, H-1B, H-2A, J-1 SWT, and L-1 (AILA, 2017). Wide speculation as to why Donald Trump would embrace one guestworker visa program while vilifying others has mostly swirled around the fact that his

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resort businesses have been long-time beneficiaries of the H-2B program. In particular, Mar-a-Lago, the so-called “Southern White House” in Palm Beach, Florida, has continually hired housekeeping staff though the H-2B for years. This fact emerged during Trump’s initial run for office in 2016 as his opponents (particularly Republican Senator Ted Cruz) used the issue to accuse Trump of hiring foreign workers in place of American workers. Yet, it ultimately did not prove detrimental to his campaign and his overall stances on immigration and guestworkers remained the same. While at no time did credible threats to end the H-2B visa emerge during Trump’s time in office, his administration did make some changes to the management and regulations associated with the H-2B that provoked a strong response from industry. These came in the wake of many changes made during the Obama presidency as noted in chapter six. Many of these related to changing the way that the government checks for compliance with program rules, such as the move away from the Bush era attestation of need system that relied on trusting employers to promise their needs are genuine, to one in which employers would prove their needs first and face audits later. In the last year of the Obama administration as the labor market tightened with continued economic recovery from the Great Recession and the unemployment rate fell across the country, the returning worker exemptions seen in 2006/7 were once again authorized by Congress to allow H-2B workers who had been in the country any of the previous three years to return to the same employer. This created the effective space for about 22,000 visas over the 66,000 cap. The pressure to bring back this policy was in no doubt partly due to intense lobbying placed on congressional members from states where the H-2B has seen heavy use in forestry, seafood processing, and of course, tourism and hospitality. In particular, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democrat Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, who held a powerful seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee that shapes spending legislation, had a guiding hand in shaping the increase in H-2B issuances. Tillis was quoted at the time showing support due to the cyclical nature of the labor shortages that he was hearing about from lobbyists and constituents. “We’re looking at it because every year, it’s Band-Aid after Band-Aid. And then every season, we’re already hearing problems from the last one” (S. M. Kim, 2016). Among those the senators were hearing from were the over one thousand employer and other stakeholder members of the H-2B Workforce Coalition, a group formed to advocate for increased access to the program. This as well as other groups such as local chambers of commerce and industry lobbying groups waged an intense campaign to see cap relief and were rewarded in those efforts when the congressional budget was passed. It ultimately created greater assurances among both employers and returning workers that they would be able to take advantage of the program, and likely placed the program on a path that would have seen further increases in the total number of issuances had the returning worker exemption been allowed to continue. The FY2017 budget, however, was the first one during the Trump administration and with it, came a clear attempt to keep the number of H-2B issuances from increasing

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further. Until this time, the authority to raise the cap had been based on legislation, but with the Fiscal Year 2017 Consolidated Budget Act, Congress decided to allow the returning worker exemption to expire, while at the same time granting authority to raise the cap to the Secretary of Homeland Security, after consultation with the Secretary of Labor to determine need. The specific language authorized DHS to authorize H2Bs, “by not more than the highest number of H-2B nonimmigrants who participated in the H-2B returning worker program in any fiscal year in which returning workers were exempt from such numerical limitation.” (Sec. 543 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017, Public Law 115–31). Because the highest number of returning workers was reached in FY 2007, the DHS Secretary had been granted the authority to issue up to an additional 64,716 visas, almost doubling the total cap if they were to choose to do so. In what was likely a shrewd political calculation, Congress not only ceded responsibility of raising the cap to the executive branch, it also passed any blame that might be assigned to the government for doing so (Bolter & Chishti, 2017). While industries have always been happy to see an extension of the cap, anti-immigration groups and labor groups have long been strongly opposed to more guestworker visas. This was scenario DHS Secretary John Kelly faced in early 2017, when the cap was reached in March. The political pressures to both raise the cap beyond 66,000 and to maintain it were intense, while also coming from both sides of the political spectrum. On one hand, the same groups that lobbied the previous year for the returning worker extension were now asking for up-front cap relief in lieu of that provision. Yet, when he originally signaled he was planning on raising the cap, he was met with stiff resistance from those in his own political party as well as other groups that were fiercely opposed to cap extension. After waiting a crucial couple of months after the spending bill was passed in early May 2017 and four months after the cap was reached for the year, Secretary Kelly finally announced the cap would increase on July 19th, but only by 15,000 visas. This number was set roughly to coincide with the total number of issuances from the previous year. The net effect was to flatten the curve and keep the H-2B from further expanding. The delay until mid-July to raise the cap was cause of the frustrations South Carolina human resources director Natalie and Cape Cod restaurant owner Gabe described in chapter six. They were without those workers when they needed them most and by the time the visas were made available it was too late. In fact, not all of the additional 15,000 visas ended up being used because they had become somewhat superfluous for so many employers. The same provision to extend the cap would be applied the following year by a different secretary, but at an earlier date at the end of May, thus avoiding the debacle of the previous year. Throughout this period, it is little surprise that the majority of the political jockeying associated with the H-2B visa revolved around the statutory cap. By FY2019, the pressure on the H-2B application process continued to increase with unemployment rates continuing to fall and requests for foreign labor certification moving higher. 2018 had seen applications that certified employers for up to 148,000 workers if only that many H-2B visas were available; 84,000 visas were eventually made

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available with the cap extension. With a shortfall of 64,000 visas and continually rising demand, lobbying intensified immediately in early 2019 when the annual cap was met. Only three days later, the H-2B Workforce coalition presented a stronger renewed call to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and DOL secretary Alexander Acosta to extend the cap even further than in the previous two years, citing massive seasonal job vacancies and business closures as a result of the visa shortage (H-2B Workforce Coalition, 2019). This letter was 40 pages long, but only two contained the content of the request. The other 38 pages contained a list of the thousands of organizations that had joined the effort. Shortly after in March, an open letter to DHS Secretary Nielsen signed by 138 congressional members of both parties argued that the 15,000 additional visas in the previous couple years were not enough (U.S. Congress, 2019). With pressure mounting, eventually DHS doubled the cap extension to 30,000 additional visas, and in doing so, made 2019 the year with the highest number of H-2B approvals since 2007/8, peaking at 97,623. Had COVID-19 not arrived with a vengeance in 2020, this number would likely have been exceeded, as the cap extension was set at 35,000 in early March after the 66,000 cap was reached in early February as had become routine. But by March it was clear that the country and world were headed into the uncharted waters of a pandemic recession, with no indication how long or how deep it might be. With economic demand clearly ebbing as quarantining and social distancing began, in June President Trump had signed the executive order freezing guestworker visas. The recovery of the demand across sectors in the following year, despite the ongoing pandemic, saw a resumption of calls for increasing the H-2B cap. As became clear very early, service positions, even permanent ones, were going unfilled, sparking a panic among employers nationwide who were forced to adapt to the extremely tight labor market. If permanent service positions could not be filled, what would that mean for temporary, seasonal jobs that employers had struggled to fill for years under normal circumstances? Thus, the push for opening all guestworker visas was loud and clear from industries all desperate for access to more workers. The newly established Biden administration followed suit from the Trump administration when new DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas approved a 22,000 extension to the cap. While many employers were happy to see some cap relief, many were not satisfied with the lower number than in previous years. This was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that created a backlog of more than 380,000 total visas applicant interviews at U.S. consulates around the world when the United States closed its doors to immigration. Even in a normal year, such a backlog would take more than a year to clear, but the Department of State also found itself extremely short-staffed (Hampton, 2021). Aside from loss of works associated with the pandemic itself, DOS was already in a precarious position due to what one policy expert for a national tourism group described to me as “a huge brain drain” due to Trump administration policies of the previous four years. What he described as a brain drain was a loss of staff across the agency due to a federal employee hiring freeze implemented during the

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first two years of the Trump administration. While the stated goal was to run the government with more efficiency than previous administrations, the action also fell in line with President Trump’s campaign rhetoric about fighting the power of the “deep state” that he argued had captured the levers of government in the name of special interests. The impact of the hiring freeze was significant enough that the Foreign Service was down almost 5% of its workforce and staff morale at several departments including Labor and State, had been severely impacted negatively (Badger et al., 2021; Hampton, 2021). An Office of Inspector General review of the impacts of the hiring freeze detailed the effects within the Bureau of Consular Affairs, which included critical understaffing of its passport agencies and visa services, that had only been mitigated by the reduction of visa applications from 2016–2018 associated with the freeze of the returning worker exemptions in those years. Then, 2019 would therefore see a return to higher visa applications at a time when consular offices were struggling to manage the normal workload (OIG, 2019). The report also explained that it would take at least two years to return to pre-hiring freeze staffing levels, but the pandemic emerged before that could be achieved. Altogether, the pandemic, combined with behind-the-scenes political efforts to affect change within the federal government slowed the process of actually having workers receive their H-2B visa, which affected the J-1 visa as well. In this context, the increasing push for regularity and certainty with regard to guestworker visa policy makes a good deal of sense. To this end, On June 15, 2021, a bipartisan group of congresspeople introduced the “H-2B Retuning Worker Exemption Act of 2021” (H.R. 3897) that seeks to make the returning worker exemption a permanent part of the program. Other provisions include some aimed at appeasing both employers and critics of the program. The former includes the establishment of a “one-stop shop” multi-agency online digital platform that would streamline the application process as well as require DOL to maintain a publicly available online job registry. Other provisions that would increase the penalties for perpetrating visa fraud and some further codifying prohibitions on fees charged to applicants by labor recruiters are clearly aimed at curbing abuse of the system. It is unknown if this bill will eventually become law or what changes it may incur in the process, but the attempt at a longer-term legislative solution rather than what has become a rather arbitrary annual process given over to the executive branch is evidence that enough grumbling from industry and activists have pushed congressional leaders into action.

If you build it, they will come If the national scale is where efforts to change laws and regulations takes place, it is at the local scale where political action aimed at dealing with the direct impacts of guestworkers is most grounded and visible. Local efforts (or lack thereof) to manage the flow of seasonal workforces or mitigate the impacts of so many extra souls

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can either make or break how successful a community may be in welcoming a massive influx of foreign guestworkers. The places that succeed do so because the political will exists that makes possible the collective action necessary to tame what otherwise tends to be a chaotic situation in the absence of concerted efforts. One place in particular has provided a model example of how local places can harness their energies to make at least one of the programs work for the town as well as the guestworkers. In a rather strange twist of fate, the largest concentration of waterparks in the United States and perhaps the world, is located in the middle of Wisconsin, an area of the country that does not immediately come to mind when thinking of warm weather and watersport. Yet, the small community situated along a narrow portion of the Wisconsin River, began its evolution from a newly emergent tourism destination just after the Second World War to the self-fashioned Waterpark Capital of the World ® in the late 1970s. In the late 1940s enterprising locals had purchased surplus military amphibious duck boats to provide tours of the river and nearby Lake Delton where in 1953 Tommy Bartlett located his Water Ski and Jumping Boat Thrill Show. This sparked the beginnings of the modern era of tourism in the region as further attractions and hotels emerged along the strip of Highway 12 running between Wisconsin Dells and the Village of Lake Delton (see figures 8.1 and 8.2). In 1979, the ironically named Waterman family opened the Noah’s Ark Waterpark, which is now considered the largest in the United States. Not to be outdone, hotels began to open their own waterpark editions and new waterparks were built throughout the 1980s and 1990s creating a noticeable agglomeration of aqua attractions in addition to more typical ones like miniature golf, go-cart tracks, and various types of museums. In 1994, however, the current iteration of the Dells area started to form when the Polynesian Water Park Hotel opened the first indoor waterpark in the United States in order to attract tourists beyond the rather short northerly summer season. Today indoor waterparks are found all over the world, but virtually every resort hotel in Dells boasts one of significant size and each continues to push to develop new attractions or features not yet seen in all the others. (Wisconsin Dells Visitor and Convention Bureau, n.d.; Wisconsin Historical Society, 2012). Of course, while located within four hours of Chicago, Illinois, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, all of which boast large populations from which to draw tourists, Wisconsin Dells and The Village of Lake Delton have less than 6,000 citizens combined. Yet, over the course of the year between four and five million tourists descend upon the area, with a large portion of those in the summer months. In short, the massive growth in touristic demand experienced as waterparks and other attractions began to one-up one another in capacity, and levels of spectacle and adventure, well outstripped the ability of the local area to fully supply the resorts with the necessary labor to keep operations running at capacity throughout the year. As a result, the tourism industry in this part of central Wisconsin has come to heavily rely on imported workers and is one of the areas with the

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Figure 8.1: Lake Delmont.

Figure 8.2: Wisconsin Dells. Source: Photos by authors. Lake Delmont and Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin has continually shifted its seasonal tourism attractions over time, but now boast the moniker of “Waterpark Capital of the World.”

highest concentrations of J-1 SWTs in the entire country. And like other seasonal tourism resort areas it too came to understand the difficulties associated with housing the thousands of students who arrived every year to operate slides, stuff visitors into go-carts and watch over swimmers as lifeguards. Unlike other areas of the country that are still struggling through what might be described as growing pains, despite the now decades of experience in hosting international student workers, the civic leaders of the Village of Lake Delton responded proactively in order to control the chaos that they found swirling around them. It is a bit difficult to pin down exactly which organization is considered the official ISOP, be it Wisconsin Dells/Lake Delton International Student Committee or the Wisconsin Dells BridgeUSA Community Support Group, also known as the Dells J-1 Consortium. Indeed, there appears to be some overlap between them and the members associated with each. What is clear though about the Wisconsin Dells area is the level of commitment and cooperation found between local volunteers, local government, businesses, and sponsors with regard to how best to manage the

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influx of international students. Like other communities, by the late 2000s and early 2010s the area had witnessed the warts associated with J-1 programs, the stresses placed on the housing market, and the appearance of unsavory characters looking to take advantage of foreign students. In this regard it was much like Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Branson, Missouri, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Ocean City, Maryland, and any other number of places that had seen their reliance on SWTs increase. Cary Brandt, a manager at a major local resort hotel and waterpark and Tom Diehl who owns the Tommy Bartlett waterskiing show are both members of Village of Lake Delton Board of Trustees and became key forces in helping to push the local government to become proactive in their approach to J-1 governance. They were driven by witnessing the ugly conditions at many of these smaller motels that could no longer compete with larger hotel resorts replete with their massive waterpark facilities. In order to cope they began to house SWTs in the summer, often in flagrant violation of numerous safety codes: The easiest thing to happen to a tourism destination is when you get older motels that can’t keep current, they’re going to make more money trying to rent by the week and crowd people in. Cary and I have been on the Village Board, I’ve been on for 30 something years. We said, ‘we are not going to turn the area into a blighted area’. So we became very proactive from the very get go . . . And so we are probably very rare as a community. I’d like to say you could probably use us as a model, for really trying to do it right. And so we said, unless we solve the housing problem, A, you’re not going to get kids to come here, and B, you’re going to decimate your commercial area. Branson is a good example. Go down the strip in Branson, and go to those old motels, there’s towels hanging everywhere on the banisters, it’s turned into a blighted area. We’re not going to allow that to happen.

Cary continued by describing further how some of the motel owners would mistreat SWTs by not only crowding students into rooms, but also by kicking them out on weekends in order to accommodate normal weekend tourists who would pay more. He described his dismay at seeing students who were wandering the streets after being evicted, “It’s an amazing thing to see because it used be we would see them walking down the street on a Friday night. ‘well where you going?’ and they would say ‘I can’t stay here until Monday now, I’ve gotta find something else’. It broke your heart.” To this end, the Village of Lake Delmont created and began to heavily enforce permits that separated the types of rooming houses that could offer shortterm (up to one week) and medium-term (7–29 days) rentals. This effectively disallowed motels from renting out rooms more than one week to avoid students from crowding in them along the tourist strip. Cary recalled the anger he felt from some of the motel owners in the wake of these new regulations: it was a little bit lawless, so these hotels would grab them and then $85 a week and fit four or five in there and we saw some scary situations . . . And co-mix, they would have a guy out on vacation with his family and all of a sudden you’ve got three guys (SWTs) hanging off the balcony with a charcoal grill, things we didn’t want to have happen . . . . well, these hotel

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owners, typically polish owners of these mom and pop hotels. I’m surprised I ever got reelected, because they would curse me out in the Walmart, “you’ve taken away from my business!”

He continued to describe the problem not only as one of lack of decent housing, but also of sponsors who displayed negligence by allowing their students to be placed in the area without first securing a place to live: And to this point, the sponsors were a big challenge for us (in the past) But some of the other sponsors they’d take the money drop the kids off and ‘good luck, happy hunting.’ I mean a 19 or 20 year old kid just being dropped from Russia and expect them to find a place to live? If you want to put a policy in place, if you’re going to be a sponsor in this community and participate in our programs here, you have to make some criteria. You have to say, the kids not coming over here until they have bonafide housing secured. Because what was happening, we were having an influx of kids here and there was no place for them to move them, so we couldn’t quantify how many were coming and at what times. Now we have it down to a science on the cycles. But the J-1s that didn’t have secured housing, they’re walking aimlessly knocking on doors. Yeah, so we wanted to say if you’re going to be here, your agreement with us, in this community to bring these kids over your sponsor side . . . is secure housing. A lot of them have worked with us, but some don’t. They say, hey, we’ll get them the job, they have 3 days to check in and they have two weeks to tell us where they’re living. And that makes it very hard mail and how to communicate. Well we’ve eliminated almost all of that at this point. it was baffling to me.

Just how they managed to eliminate most of the stresses associated with housing, is what makes Wisconsin Dells-Lake Delton stand out among all other communities with large concentrations of SWTs. While some places like Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Jackson, Wyoming, among others have established their own regulations or programs aimed at solving the overall problem of housing, Lake Delton’s efforts were directly targeted at the presence of guestworkers. In this effort, they are the most unique because in the face of a severe lack of housing, they cut right to the heart of the matter, and built it themselves. Their solution was to find a way to place enough dormitory style housing within the community to alleviate the cyclical pressures on the strained housing market and disempower the bad actors and overcrowding in the few places where SWTs could find lodging. The outcome of this effort is the Hiawatha Residence Hall, which opened in 2014 and was the very reason I traveled to Wisconsin Dells. I wanted to better understand the context of how this one place represented the only large community-sponsored dormitories geared toward seasonal workers that had been built in the United States. From the start of the project, the trustees were clear that they did not want to see the village become the direct owner and landlord for such a property. At the same time, they wanted to be able to ensure that any such building would be adequate in design and function to adequately house workers. The problem was how to attract private actors to invest in such a project. To accomplish this, rather than directly build and manage the property themselves, the Village of Lake

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Figure 8.3: Hiawatha Residence Hall. Source: Photo by author. The first example of community-developed housing for J-1 Summer Work Travel and other seasonal workers. It can host over 2,000 people across six dormitory buildings.

Delton Community Development Authority provided a subsidy to a private developer in order to incentivize them to take on the burden. Tom and Cary described how their program works: Tom: If you build a dorm that will house 200 or more people approved by the planning commission, we will give you $750,000. And that roughly is about 24% of the total construction cost. They are about 3 million for those buildings. Cary: It gave us the ability to also look at the layout and say this is acceptable for these kids and we would have overall control of the designs. Tom: The village controls the designs to make sure we don’t have overcrowding and so on and so forth. Now here we are and we probably have dorms that are approaching 2,000 kids. It has taken off all that pressure of trying to find the places where motels used to be overcrowding and overcharging. And that’s the ultimate goal.

The Hiawatha Residence Hall is situated centrally close to the largest waterparks and is connected to them by a dedicated bike path. Initially consisting of four dormitories the property was subsequently expanded to six dormitories by 2019 (see Figure 8.3). The administrative building also houses a large community center space that regularly serves to host SWT orientation meetings as well as large social gatherings associated with cultural programming, and offices of at least one major J-1 sponsor. Being this close to the sponsor allows for more effective oversight of the SWTs in the area by allowing face-to-face contact and an easier ability to program cultural outreach opportunities. Each dormitory building also maintains a large communal kitchen facility to allow residents to prepare their own meals. The rooms look and feel very similar to college dormitories, with bunk beds housing up

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to four people (see Figure 8.4). The property is also secured behind fencing and under 24-hour surveillance with limitations on the entrance of non-residents, which in chapter seven Tom and Cary noted as important steps to help protect SWTs from anyone looking to take advantage of the students. While the property is open to American citizens as well, it tends to mostly house international students and can now accommodate up to roughly 2,000 workers at any given time.

Figure 8.4: Hiawatha Residence Hall Dormitories. Source: Photo by author. The interiors of the Hiawatha Residence Hall dormitories feature rooms that host up to four people with a bed for each. The communal kitchen features several ovens, microwaves and sinks and a sizeable preparation space to allow many people to cook their own meals. All of the buildings secure, with only residence hall occupants allowed entrance.

In addition to spearheading the stand-alone development of Hiawatha, they also provided similar incentives to businesses who would build their own large dormitories to house their own staff. To date at least three new dorms have been built at various waterparks through this program. Together with stronger housing enforcement actions, the problems associated with crowding J-1s in small, older motels has mostly disappeared in years since it was built. Today, other seasonal tourism communities throughout the United States that are actively seeking how to mitigate their own housing shortages often take trips to Wisconsin Dells to see what they have accomplished. Sometimes the trustees or other ISOP representatives participate in conferences or seminars to instruct others on how they have developed their plans. The Department of State also sees them as a model of how communities can respond in effective ways to the presence of Bridges USA programs. The question of why this happened in central Wisconsin first rather than other locations in the United States similarly reliant on seasonal guestworkers, with housing problems equal to if not more acute is an open question. However, one thing

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also stands out about the area, in particular that suggests a major factor that may explain how this action became politically feasible. While the area receives an enormous number of both tourists and SWTs, it is not a large place geographically or in the total number of resort establishments compared to massive coastal strips like Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The result is a tight-knit community with long standing ties between businesses, government, and the local social order, highlighted by the fact that business representatives are so heavily entrenched in local political leadership. Such connections makes political consensus on issues like housing more achievable than other places where business interests may not share the concerns of the local population, something to which Tom alluded in describing why he felt they had been successful: We’re a small community. Everything you see in this community was built by locals. It may have been sold last year or the year before like Noah’s Ark, but basically everything is home grown. And when they have that then you have companies that are willing to give to scholarship programs for the high school, they’re willing to support the Rotary, whatever it is. When you get to other areas where it’s just a big business commodity and be done with it. That’s why I like to believe that we are the model of how to handle it, because we understand that big picture and how important it is.

Cary reiterated this point in describing other places where businesses operate in their own respective silos without considering long term problems and solutions. Indeed, both Tom and Cary had seen what happens when those interests begin to diverge from local priorities. Noah’s Ark waterpark, the business that more than any was responsible for the explosion of aquaparks in the area had sold in 2012 to a large national amusement park operator called Palace Entertainment, itself owned by Spanish firm Parques Reunidos. This was its first investment in the state of Wisconsin. Yet, when the dorm building incentive program was introduced, Noah’s Ark was the only large employer that opted not to take advantage. Tom and Cary remain convinced that had the previous owners still been involved, that they would have. It is impossible to know for sure if that is the case, but it is likely that a company without institutional knowledge of a place and with limited local social connection may only see something like a worker dorm as a financial liability rather than something that helps insure successful recruitment and retention of workers. Another factor is the cost and availability of land. The relative isolation of the Dells Wisconsin area is fortunate in that it does not create constraints on the local land market as is seen in coastal, island, and mountain communities. It is this problem where other seasonal communities seem to have focused most of their political energies.

“In Nantucket it’s all about the dirt” While Dells Wisconsin/Lake Delmont provide the rare example of local government specifically and directly seeking to mitigate the negative impacts of seasonal

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guestworker programs, other places have been politically active in at least attempting to solve the underlying housing problems that contribute to the necessity of guestworker programs. Nantucket Massachusetts, is one of these places where local civic authorities have become increasingly active in trying to find solutions alongside private entities. A big part of this investment has been in finding better coordination of its efforts to establish affordable housing. By 2015, the town had hired a Nantucketer named Tucker Holland as a full-time independent housing consultant before eventually making him the official Housing Specialist a couple years later. Since 2019 he is now the Municipal Housing Director for the town and perhaps the most central figure in orchestrating policies intended to bring more workforce housing to the community. No one is closer to the issue. Yet, as it is altogether clear, in waiting until relatively late to develop action on affordable housing, Nantucket finds itself in a hole, and as such Tucker has his work cut out for him, something of which he is intimately aware: Our Land Bank was established in 1984. Since 1984, until last year, CPI had increased . . . Again, this is, don’t quote me, but this is a pretty good order of magnitude. CPI increased roughly 67% during that time period. The average home price in America increased by, I believe it was, 135% during that period. The average home price in Boston, which is considered to be a hot market during that timeframe, increased 550%. the average home price in Nantucket during that timeframe increased 850%. In a way, the island to some extent is paying a little bit of a cost right now for not having addressed this. You can look at headlines in the paper from 20 years ago, and it talks about the year-round housing issue . . . . Why wasn’t it addressed earlier? Obviously, I don’t really know the answer to that, but in a place where the land is so valuable . . . Actually, Nat Lowell, who’s the chair of the NPEDC, the Planning and Economic Development Council, really smart guy, but he talks in really simple colloquialisms, and stuff. He’s like, “In Nantucket, it’s all about the dirt.” It’s true. You can see why more affordable housing hasn’t been developed when land is so valuable here, but there is a cost from not doing it.

In essence, the question of when to build affordable housing in places like Nantucket is much like the old adage regarding the best time to plant a tree: 20 years ago, with the second best time being right now. While it seems that Nantucket eventually began to take action in response to the increasingly dire housing shortage it appears that at least part of their motivation came in the form of the state of Massachusetts providing its own nudge. Indeed, a large portion of Tucker’s job has been to balance the needs of the town with those mandated by the state. In 1969, the Massachusetts legislature, passed a Comprehensive Permit Act that amended state laws to encourage the development of affordable housing for citizens statewide. Under Chapter 40B of the Massachusetts General Laws, municipalities must maintain at least 10% of its subsidized housing for those making up to 80% of the area median income (AMI). In communities that fail to meet this progress, independent developers may apply for a comprehensive permit that allows them to bypass local zoning restrictions that make building too expensive in order to build moderate to low-income housing and to build more densely than they

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would otherwise be allowed to do. In effect, it streamlines the permitting process and allows for the creation of new apartment complexes as long as at least 25% of the new units will be deed-restricted for affordability while the majority are sold at market rates. While local zoning boards of appeal may choose to approve, amend, or deny comprehensive permits, developers building in areas with less than 10% affordable housing are able to appeal such decisions to a state-level Housing Appeals Committee (HAC) that may opt to overrule them. While on one hand this allows for the faster establishment of affordable housing units, it comes with the side effect of local municipalities losing an element of control over how new housing is to be implemented. The fear of losing control serves as a nudge prompting them to action. Such is the case in Nantucket where the units listed in its Subsidized Housing Inventory (SHI) came in well under the 40B threshold at only 2.5% in 2016 (Nantucket Chapter 40B Housing Production Plan, 2016). Because the island had continually failed to reach the threshold to avoid 40B developments they had been in a position of vulnerability to developers wishing to bypass the normal permitting processes. As a result, four 40B developments of various sizes were built in the past decade, all meeting at least some local opposition before being approved. More recently in late 2017, a new development was proposed by a couple of local Nantucket developers that sought to build 60 single family homes and 96 condominiums on roughly 13 acres, very close to where several of the other 40B developments had emerged. This development, named Surfside Crossing, has led to considerable backlash from many in the local community beyond what had been seen previously. One group in particular, Nantucket Tipping Point, was established specifically to challenge the proposal and along with other established organizations including the Nantucket Land Council, an environmental advocacy group, have presented fierce opposition. At the original Nantucket Zoning Board of Appeals meeting 800 community members packed into the largest gathering place on the island, many of them hoping to see the project defeated. Eventually when asked to make amendments the developers predictably appealed to the state-level HAC where it has been tied up in the approval process ever since. The proposal has since been revised to include only 156 condominiums across 18 three-story buildings, 39 of the units being restricted as affordable housing. The opposition groups continue to appeal to the HAC regarding these changes, mostly on grounds of the stresses the project places on infrastructure and the removal of open natural spaces on the island. While the Tipping Point group represents the most vocal opposition, there are those on the island who are in favor of the proposal, mostly citing the desperate need for more housing. Others simply do not like this particular proposal for its higher density and likelihood of producing more traffic. Some have cited that while the minimum of affordable units is included in the project, it is not enough, and if it instead all units were affordable, they would be in favor. One argument raised by those in opposition is that the new affordable units will be open to anyone in the state who meets the low-income threshold. If people

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from off-island move to Nantucket to take advantage of low-income housing, they argue, it would increase the overall population rather than necessarily provide housing to worker already living on the island, and furthermore these people and the higher density building would lead the march in changing the character of the island (Graziadei, 2021a). Ultimately, the Surfside Crossing development presents the tensions that exist between the clear need for more affordable housing to solve the workforce issue and the desire to not let Nantucket substantially change. It also highlights the animosity that can be felt when local decision making is bypassed to a higher scale of governance. But some of this may have been avoided or at least a greater consensus might have been reached had the proposal at Surfside Crossing remained at the level of the Nantucket Zoning Board. If the local community had acted earlier to deal with their housing affordability problem, Surfside Crossing could not have been proposed as a 40B development. This is because while the 40B rules do provide a stick with the threat of uncontrolled development, they also provide a carrot by allowing municipalities the potential of protection if they do begin to act proactively on their own. Even when communities come in under the 10% threshold, they do have the opportunity to stave off 40B development with one or two years of safe harbor if a municipality shows steady good-faith improvement on their affordable housing stock. If a community is continually building affordable housing certified by the state, they can realistically never open themselves to a hostile 40B project until they have fully met the 10% threshold. In other words, the safe harbor provision incentivizes local governments to attempt to add affordable workforce housing to their communities on their own, so others do not do it for them. This is not to say that those on Nantucket had not been active in recent years considering the efforts of Tucker Holland, as municipal housing director and Anne Kuszpa with Housing Nantucket, among many others. Both public and private housing initiatives can indeed be certified as part of the subsidized housing inventory, and both are a necessary part of finding housing solutions. But even projects created and controlled by local authorities are not immune to the same sort of backlashes met by developments like Surfside Crossing and presents the sort of messy local politics that have provided the rationale for initiatives at the state scale like the 40B law. For example, a 64-unit workforce housing rental development (6 Fairgrounds) proposed by the Town of Nantucket on land it had long owned and intended to utilize for public housing initiatives was quickly met with a legal challenge by three nearby property owners who claimed it violated zoning by-laws (Balling, 2018). Ultimately the town won the appeal, and the development has moved forward, but not before several months of delay, which was just enough time to prevent the town from potentially being certified for safe harbor. Tucker Holland could not but help expressing some dismay over that fact:

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It is important on a small island that we go about it in the best way we can. That’s why it’s a little frustrating, I’ll be honest, with the appeal by these three neighbors of the 6 Fairgrounds project . . . That could have been two years of safe harbor if we’d been able to keep moving forward with the developer and get those units listed in a timely way. Because we didn’t, we didn’t have that opportunity. Trying to say, because of the appeal, it got in the way of being able to work with the developer to get those listed because they give you credit, actually . . . before they’re actually built. We potentially could have gotten two years of safe harbor, which would probably have made a lot of people happy with respect to this 40B project. To me, it doesn’t mean that, as a community, we have to say no outright to the 40B, but it does give you a hell of a lot more leverage with the developer to say, ‘Hey, we want more affordable. We want lower density. We want a little more green space in there.’

From Tucker’s perspective, if it is possible to get a private developer to provide affordable housing that meets the building standards of the community, it doesn’t matter if it came through an original 40B permit or through the town’s proposals. But overall, the tensions over building housing highlight the delicate tightrope that housing authorities and advocates often face in trying to add new housing. They face a sort of catch-22 in that almost everyone will acknowledge the dire need for affordable housing, but only insofar as landscape changes are minimal and it does not directly impact their own living spaces. Building with higher densities may be the most logical step in meeting the challenge, but higher densities are opposed in zoning laws and by residents who do not want to see more traffic and stress on the unfractured, local services, or the environment. On an island like Nantucket where land is not only constrained by both the surrounding ocean and by a large percentage of land that remains protected from development, those remaining spaces open for development are not only politically contentious but incredibly expensive. In this regard, Tucker and the town of Nantucket have been active in their appeals to the state of Massachusetts for help in finding new sources of funding to address housing.

Ending the Nantucket Shuffle? With available land selling at such a premium on Cape Cod and Nantucket, the search for capital to support affordable housing is crucial for simply securing land to build upon let alone to construct it. Furthermore, the problem is ongoing and thus, local state representatives in close coordination with the towns have been active in trying to support legislative solutions to secure sustainable long-term funding sources. In particular, the Town has repeatedly voted in favor of a home rule petition that would establish a .5% fee to be levied on the portions of any real estate transfers on the island above two million dollars (Rios, 2020). This model has already been in use since 1983 when the country’s first public agency devoted to open-land preservation was established as the Nantucket Land Bank. Since that time, it has received a 2% tax levied on all real estate transactions which has

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provided it with over $350 million to acquire and protect 3,800 acres across the island. It is now the second largest landowner in Nantucket behind the private nonprofit Nantucket Conservation Foundation which holds about 9,000 acres. The bill would effectively create a housing bank that would provide a steady source of financing to town housing authority (Graziadei, 2021b). Unfortunately, the home rule petition, while allowing municipalities to create their own laws specific to their local communities, must pass through the state legislature for approval. Despite many attempts, it has never succeeded, effectively dying in committee. The state senator for the Cape and islands, Julian Cyr and state representative for Nantucket and central Cape Cod, Dylan Fernandes have been co-sponsors in forwarding the home rule petitions to the Beacon Hill legislature in Boston. Representative Fernandes, explained to me that the petition has faced stiff lobbying efforts by the real estate industry in the state, arguing that they “just don’t care” about affordable housing. For them it is simply about making money and this measure would be adding taxes that might stand as a barrier to home sales. This has not stopped Representative Fernandes from trying however, and after multiple threats that he would do so if the local home rule petition was continually defeated, he has now signed onto a bill that would amend state laws to allow towns to establish a real estate transfer fee without resorting to a home rule petition. While it is unknown if this particular bill will pass as it is in process as of this writing, it is clear that after years of neglecting the festering problem of the workforce housing shortage, forces have lined up on the island to make it a priority. In June 2021, the town council awarded $16 million toward various affordable housing projects; this came after $20 million had been allocated in 2019. At the same meeting, however, the voters roundly declined a proposal to divert 25% of the Land Bank funds temporarily to support housing, suggesting that with the ongoing tension between building and preserving open spaces the latter continues to hold sway. Still, it seems that the efforts by Nantucketers over the past decade have finally begun to pay tangible dividends. In 2019, Nantucket was finally awarded safe harbor for two years from 40B projects. This was renewed for a year in 2021 and now can claim about 5.5% of its housing stock is subsidized for affordability, still far short of the 10% threshold needed to permanently reject 40B developments. With 273 units on the subsidized housing inventory list it still has about 215 new units to add, but considering recent progress and the possibility of steady funding if the housing bank can be established, it seems that Nantucket has at least positioned itself to continually add workforce housing (Graziadei, 2021c). This, according to Senator Cyr is key, who maintains that the housing issues the Cape and islands face, “will be solved or will not be solved based on action taken at the municipal level”(Lisinski, 2021). Whether or not these efforts will finally end the “Nantucket Shuffle” is an open question. Even if a significant amount of year-round housing is built to allow local people to live on island affordably, there is no guarantee that seasonal workers will be needed in fewer numbers, or that they will have an easier time finding their own

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places to live. But this is precisely what housing advocates are hoping for as the issues are intimately related. It is something that everyone seems to realize, from those stuck in the annual housing shuffle to part-time owners who for only come for a couple of months at a time in the summer. At meeting with a group of part-timers, Tucker reports genuine surprise and delight that they were so supportive of efforts to pass the housing bank real estate transfer tax. Contrary to assumptions that they would hold ire for any tax increases, they instead embraced the measure: “You’re going to alleviate traffic. You’re going to ensure that the restaurant I like to go to is open seven days a week, and they don’t have to close one day because they don’t have enough people here, because they don’t have housing. Solve that problem. I’m willing to contribute (my taxes).” For this sort of super-wealthy tourist, the small portion they would pay in addition when purchasing a house, is completely worth it.

Domestic Problems International Solutions The above examples make it clear that political action at the local level plays an enormous role in mitigating the impacts of U.S. guestworker policies and the forces that make them so integral to seasonal tourism industries. But guestworker programs also play a role in national level politics surrounding international issues as well as in geopolitics. Regarding the latter, both the J-1 and the H-2B served geopolitical aims from their inception. The purpose of the J-1 was specifically to build cultural and political ties with other countries in the great struggle for influence during the Cold War. The fact that it is still an instrument of the Department of State suggests it remains one among many tools of international diplomacy. The H-2B, while decidedly organized primarily as a work visa, if we consider its origins in the British West Indies Temporary Alien Labor Program, was also a vehicle for quelling unrest in the Caribbean during World War II. While the circumstances are different today, the H-2B has recently been utilized as a tool to mitigate the political fallout associated with the stream of refugees who have sought asylum at the U.S.’s southern border with Mexico. In 2014, the highly publicized, and politicized, appearance of 68,000 unaccompanied Central American minors fleeing gang violence in their home countries came to public attention under the Obama administration. This represented a shift from what had been a rather predictable stream of mostly younger males seeking work in the United States, to sudden spikes of children and whole families looking for shelter from the violence of drug gangs, lack of opportunity, inequality, and corruption at home. The 2014 crisis prompted the administration to seek $3.7 billion in addition to the normal allocation of funds used to deal with mass migration along the Mexican border. The costs and the conspicuous presence of large groups of migrants gathered at the border were later heavily implicated in the anti-immigration rhetoric that fueled Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his immigration policies upon taking office. From the

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campaign slogan “Build the Wall” to the children kept in detention centers after being forcibly separated from their parents, much of political energy that Trump derived from his political base lay in xenophobic and racialized notions of which groups should be considered acceptable immigrants. At the time, however, observers also noted the amount of funding for enforcement of the border far outstripped the $600 million being spent on foreign assistance to the three “Northern Triangle” countries Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras (Ernst, et al., 2020). It is for this reason, that a new guiding framework called the Strategy for Engagement in Central America was developed and implemented beginning in 2015. This overall strategy identified three types of assistance in security, prosperity, and governance to be prioritized by the United States. USAID was to be used heavily to support many of the various programs associated with this new strategy. A large goal of the initiative was to help to build more stable societies in order to reduce the push factors that were driving people to migrate to the United States in the first place. It is notable that this policy of engagement with Central America was initially maintained at the beginning of the Trump presidency, considering that it sought to decrease irregular northward migration. However, by 2019 most of the foreign assistance to the Northern Triangle was suspended by the Trump administration in response to the continued presence of asylum-seeking migrants appearing at the border, despite whatever other progress may have been made. This forced USAID to close ongoing projects and generally threatened regional backsliding toward increased insecurity (CRS, 2019). Even still the Trump Administration sought other ways to engage in Central America, including an initiative to utilize the H-2B program. This seems to have stemmed from ideas floated in policy circles that guestworkers visas have potential for both assisting in overseas development and as part of the larger conversation of immigration reform. For example, The Niskanen Center, a mostly centrist Washington D.C. think tank, advocates for the creation of a development visa that would theoretically serve to generate remittances for economies in need and allow foreign citizens to build personal skills (La Corte, 2019). The argument is that this would have the potential of achieving better results than foreign aid alone. Similarly, the libertarian CATO Institute directly advocated creating a “carveout” in the H-2B program by which a certain number of H-2Bs would be reserved for workers from the Northern Triangle. This was among several policy proposals aimed at increasing legal migration as a means of alleviating pressure on the U.S.-Mexico border. Theoretically, legal returning migrants would funnel their earnings back home and create great economic stability and hopefully combat the poor economic conditions that lead people to see migration as a solution to unemployment and low wages (Bier, 2019). In effect, by creating more legal mobility for some workers, many more would stay in place with fewer push factors forcing them to leave. Some of this argument is based on a correlation in the rise of undocumented migration from Mexico in the years following the sunsetting of the Bracero program and declining with the rise of the H-2B visa early 2000s. While this

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ignores other potential explanatory factors associated with heightened migration such as the massive dislocations of Mexican farmers associated with the implementation of NAFTA or lower demographic pressures due to declining Mexican birth rates that also happen to correspond to with declining migration, this does not discount the potential that carveouts may represent. For one, with smaller populations in Central America relative to Mexico, and very few working on the H-2B in the past, any increase in the number of H-2B visa should have a greater proportional impact on the countries as a whole. In 2019, the Trump administration signed an Asylum Cooperation Agreement with Guatemala agreeing to require Non-Guatemalan asylum seekers passing through the country to be returned there, if those people then reached the United States. The same agreements were made later that year with Honduras and El Salvador. In making these deals, the Trump administration had pushed immigration cooperation as a condition for other types of assistance (Miroff, 2019). It had also done so in an effort to reduce the total number of asylum seekers who were being forced back into Mexico where the United States had been sending them since January 2019 under the Migration Protection Protocols also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Mexico had resisted making a similar agreement of its own yet based on humanitarian grounds was allowing the asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while they awaited decisions on their applications by U.S. immigration authorities (Snow & Taxin, 2021). These Asylum Cooperation Agreements were criticized as violating the U.S.’s own laws that deported immigrants should only be removed to “safe third countries,” and none of the three could in any way be considered safe considering they have been the source of the violence that the refugees are fleeing. Aside from financial assistance, including to help the Northern Triangle countries build out their own asylum system, the United States also agreed to create legal migration pathways through the H-2B program. In short, the United States used the H-2B as part of its leverage in an attempt to relieve the pressure of so many Central Americans showing up as refugees. In early 2020, after the annual cap had been reached as usual, it was once again raised by 35,000, but this time a carveout of 10,000 visas was reserved for migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador (DHS, 2020). Unfortunately, around the same time, the COVID-19 had begun its march around the word and by the summer the administration had announced the temporary stoppage of the guestworker visas. By the time guestworker visa admittances resumed in 2021, Trump was out of office.

Northern Triangle H-2B Carveout In 2021 the new Biden administration revived the H-2B carveout policy that had been initiated by the Trump administration as part of its plan to coerce those countries to contribute to efforts to reduce migration of asylum seekers. When the annual

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cap was reached as usual in the spring, the administration this time approved 22,000 extra visas for the remainder of the year. Of these, 6,000 were set aside for the Northern Triangle. However, the Biden administration, decided to do so while changing course from other policies it deemed harmful. This included cancelling the Asylum Cooperation Agreements by executive order, citing a desire for a “mutually respectful approach to managing migration across the region” (Exectutive Office of the President, 2021). Not surprisingly, there were plenty of skeptics about the initiative. For one, these are countries without any significant legacy of recruitment and therefore not many organizations were ready to find enough qualified workers. Migrant advocate attorney Isabel echoed this question but also worried that in mandating that a portion of the extended cap was earmarked only for Northern Triangle workers some employers would not be able to bring back workers from the previous year that were already trained and reliable, “I’m wondering if you don’t get to bring your worker from Mexico because you didn’t win the lottery this time, is the government going to tell you that you can choose maybe somebody from the Northern Triangle?” As someone who had spent a great deal of her career assisting Mexican workers, she knew that not being able to return would be devastating to many people. It is hard to say if this early attempt was a success or not. Elsa had been working early on establishing her recruitment business in anticipation of the carveout during the Trump administration and as a result has been one of the few people ready to begin working in the countries, Honduras in particular: They (The Northern Triangle countries) all claimed they were ready, but they weren’t. And we’re still working through some of those pains . . . They thought they were ready. And yes, they wanted those jobs, those opportunities for their workers. What country would turn that down? But it was painful. Unfortunately, it was only 6,000. So we’re not talking about 60,000. So it was a small number. But they were nowhere ready. I mean, trust me, there’s nowhere near 6,000 workers. But during this time, even though I had employers screaming in my ear, ‘Where’s my workers,’ and they’re still doing that, it’s getting fixed, and it’s working. And by next year, if they’re still going down this pathway, it’ll work. It’ll work. Because we now have the infrastructure in place by virtually of doing it and finding out what we had in place or what they had in place wasn’t there. So we now have the infrastructure. If they’re serious about doing it, we can do it, and we can be successful with it.

Elsa is optimistic that the growing pains of the first year will improve, in part because of she could see that the Ministry of Labor in Honduras was working hard to find applicants and have them vetted properly and that USAID was actively involved in recruiting workers as well. Of course, Elsa was right that in 2021 they were not quite ready. As it turns out, only a portion of the H-2B carveout ended up being used despite the intense demand. The remainder were ultimately opened up to workers from other countries (Fragomen, 2021), much to the chagrin of organizations like the Center For Immigration Studies who saw it as the government bowing down to employers demands

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(North, 2021). This argument, however, while correct that the U.S. government was most certainly acting in the interest of helping businesses with labor shortages, ignores the reality that the Northern Triangle countries were just not ready to deliver the full complement of workers just yet. In fact, it may take some time for recruitment agencies to find their footing in the region to see if they can meet the full carveout numbers in upcoming years. Furthermore, whether or not this will actually alleviate the refugee numbers headed to the United States or lead to meaningful local development in Central America has yet to be seen, but remains an important question. The eventual outcome will require research to determine if use of the H-2B in international negotiations and to assist in development is actually useful or simply just window dressing.

9 Conclusion A Natural Experiment In summer 2021, seasonal tourism and hospitality businesses in the United States found themselves enduring a second summer of a global pandemic. However, things were fundamentally different in this year: vaccines had been developed and were being actively distributed. Many of the COVID-19 restrictions put in place during the height of the pandemic were loosening just as the summer holiday season in the United States was getting underway. While the pandemic had not yet dissipated, people had grown more comfortable with the idea of traveling again and the summer was promising to be a busy one. However, not everything was going to be a return to the “normal” pre-COVID experience of life, work, and travel. Now fully vaccinated, my family and I ventured out for the first real vacation in over a year, heading west to see friends in Utah and to visit some of that state’s majestic national parks. Unfortunately, as we quickly learned, many others, in their desperation to get a break from their own banal existence after being so ever hemmed in by the pandemic, also had similar plans. What we also saw was a vacation landscape that was once again becoming overrun with tourists, but without the staff to meet them. On one day, we visited the Utah Olympic Park in Park City, an adventure park retrofitted with extreme tubing, ziplining, and other similar attractions utilizing the old ski jumps, chair lifts, and other infrastructure from the 2002 Winter Olympic games. There we met several J-1 SWT workers from Colombia, assisting me in jumping off of a 15-foot ledge into an airbag. They were much like the hundreds of J-1 students I have met over the years. They were doing their jobs well, and happy to talk with me and tell me that they were enjoying their current jobs. And who could blame them? They were staying in nice accommodations originally built to accommodate Olympians in a gorgeous place that most of us could only dream of affording. But as I talked with other young American workers in the park, it seems that the few SWTs that I had met were the exception. Not that many J-1s had yet made it this year and the park was operating with fewer workers than they would in a normal summer. When my daughter and I climbed onto a ropes course, we were told that while they optimally operate with five or six for the attraction, they were only using three workers at that time. It was clear in that moment that the lack of workers at key places along the route where they would normally facilitate the movement of guests was creating a substantial line. Later we traveled south to Moab, Utah. It is a small town, formally a mining center, but now the primary base for tourists visiting Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, or to experience the one of the many mountain biking trails, or to raft on the Colorado River. In an unhappy coincidence, on the day we arrived the Wall Street Journal publish an article titled, “National Parks Are Overcrowded and Closing Their https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643800-009

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Gates,” featuring Moab and the two national parks we had come to visit (Pohle, 2021). Among the anecdotes, data, and analysis of the rising number of visitors to the parks that were being stretched past their capacities, were mentions of worker shortages that were associated with the booming second-home market. Between unavailable housing forcing some rangers to commute more than 50 miles to the nearest town and funding cuts that have prevented national parks from adding additional staff, Arches and Canyonlands were dealing with severe staffing shortages. It was something we had already been warned about, and indeed we ended up amending our own schedule to avoid the long lines of cars at the entrances to both parks. Also mentioned in the article was the fact that McDonalds was so desperate for workers that it was now paying $18 per hour, something we also witnessed as we saw the very McDonalds sign advertising that fact as we drove into town. What was not mentioned in the article, however, was the number of missing exchange student workers that are normally in Moab working in any given summer. At several of the restaurants I asked about the labor shortages. One barbecue restaurant manager informed me that they are always dealing with a shortage of workers, but that this year it was worse because the J-1s had not come to work at all. It was what I had expected to hear. Despite the fact that the Biden administration had allowed guestworker programs to resume after April 1, 2021, the staffing shortages at U.S. consulates and the backlog of processing all forms of visas that needed to be reviewed kept both H-2Bs and J-1 visas from being filled very quickly. Furthermore, some consulates remained closed in Europe, which is the source of so many Bridge SWT workers. The result is that the United States was witnessing a “natural” experiment of sorts that might be described as “the summer without a guestworker?”. In previous years of conducting interviews with human resource directors and business owners, I had often asked how they would manage if they suddenly had no access to the visa programs. Most of the time the question would be met with dire predictions of how their business would suffer or fail completely. Here in 2021, that very scenario was starting to play out. Of course, tourism demand was still not quite back to pre-pandemic levels, but it was much higher than it had been the year before when the guestworker visa bans were imposed. At least in 2020 tourism demand was also severely depressed. This year demand was high enough to get a good sense of what peak seasonality looks like in tourism towns that were not able to secure their normal complement of H-2B or SWT workers. Over summer 2021, news reports from across the country mushroomed as community after community began to report their own lack of guestworkers and the struggle of their businesses to stay afloat. Old Orchard Beach, Maine, saw a drop from the normal 700 SWTs to around 150 in mid-summer when they are needed the most (Cohen & Ember, 2021). Across Alaska only about 200 SWTs had arrived by the beginning of July, 10% of total number that worked in the state in 2019. Restaurants that usually relied on the foreign students were having to make do with fewer workers, leading some to stay closed on Mondays and Tuesdays for want of staff

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(DeMarban, 2021). The same was true in Myrtle Beach where go-kart tracks, miniature golf courses, and water parks were all short on staff and had to close earlier and stay open only on weekends (Watson & Dickerson, 2021). Knowing this was going to be a tough season, the city of Myrtle Beach asked visitors to the “Grand Strand” to be patient with the workers who were without the normal help (Wilcox, 2021). They warned that wait times may be longer and people should be prepared. The same could be seen in Cape Cod where a restaurant even took a “Day of Kindness” break to allow the workers time to rest. The owner there had seen enough of her workers being treated badly by patrons. “It’s like abuse,” she said. “It’s things that people are saying that wouldn’t be allowed to be on TV because they would be bleeped. People are always rude to restaurant workers, but this far exceeds anything I’ve seen in my 20 years (Vigdor, 2021).” While some J-1 and H-2B workers did arrive in the summer of 2021, the numbers were substantially lower than normal, enough to provide a snapshot of what the two programs mean to the places and businesses where guestworkers come in the heaviest numbers.

At the Crossroads: “The Great Resignation” If there has been one positive outcome of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it has been the rise to public consciousness of the concept of the “essential worker” and just who in society are the people that actually keep things running. The notion that society is lost without their services has pushed the narrative to question why these people who are supposedly so important are also laboring in the most precarious positions. Early in the pandemic, the U.S government, in a policy shift, effectively acknowledged the importance of “essential workers” in the commodity chain by creating a pathway to utilize the H-2B visa to secure enough workers to shore up the food supply system. In May 2020, the Department of Homeland Security announced a temporary rule change to some H-2B requirements to help secure the food supply chain as a public health emergency measure. The new rule basically streamlined the process for already approved employers to bring in workers faster in order to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. It also allowed current H-2B workers to extend their employment in the United States beyond the normal three-year limit (H-2B Temporary Non-Agricultural Workers, 2020). In many ways it foreshadowed what was to come. For the next year, many people would indeed lose their jobs or be laid off temporarily. Many began to work at home. Altogether, during the worst of the pandemic the United States collectively paused, sighed, and took stock of itself. As I sat down to finish this book, the United States was finding itself at a crossroads. It may have taken a global pandemic for it to get here, but at last it seems that American workers have finally responded to over 30 years of stagnating wages, this time by not going into work. The summer and autumn of 2021 has been witness to what some are calling “The Great Resignation.” The term itself has received some

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scrutiny as to whether it describes what has been happening in the vast labor markets of the country, but at least captures the idea that a great many people have voluntarily left their jobs in search of a better work/life balance. “Taken on its surface, the Great Resignation foregrounds the language of job status, but misses a parallel, arguably bigger story: the radical realignment of values that is fueling people to confront and remake their relationship to life at home, with their families, with their friends, and in their lives outside of labor” (Hymes, 2021). Thus far, tourism and hospitality industries appear to be the most impacted of all by the raft of people leaving their jobs (T. Smith, 2021). As signs at hotels and restaurants appeared asking patrons for their patience and forgiveness for the lackluster service due to lack of workers, the public at large is becoming acutely aware of the negative stigma surrounding so many of the jobs that are now going unfilled. It is hard to know for sure what exactly made this moment the one to cause so many people to resign, but clearly the pandemic was the catalyst. It may be that the pandemic served to highlight the precarity and soul-crushing characteristics of many tourism and hospitality jobs, especially those that exposed them to greater risks of contracting COVID-19 or facing increasingly rude and demanding customers. It may also be that the social supports put in place by the state, such as unemployment payments, gave workers the time to take stock of their own lives and reevaluate their relationship to work, deepening the debate about how generous such benefits should be and how long they should last. Clearly, many did not like what they saw. It is impossible at this point to know exactly what this means for the future, but considering the level of difficulty these businesses had found in staffing the seasonal tourism-dependent areas of the country even before the pandemic, the picture is not exactly rosy.

Geographic Problems, Geographic Solutions? The pandemic has highlighted the fragility of a reliance on labor markets that are projected across space. Seasonal tourism-dependent places are ever vulnerable to the shifting economic, political, cultural, and ecological swings associated with tourism demand which is itself constantly in flux. Similarly, the very same litany of factors, in addition to others such as state migration polices, the availability (or not) of transportation, the availability (or not) of affordable workforce housing, all may also enable or constrain the mobility of workforces. When isolated places begin to rely on imported workers to manage their business, they are ultimately placing themselves in a precarious position, because mobility of workers is not guaranteed. The pandemic made this all the clearer when thousands of guestworkers stopped arriving for work. Throughout this book I have attempted to construct a geographic analysis in an attempt to understand how so many places that have become dependent on seasonal

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tourism have also come to rely on the temporary migration of foreign workers to be able sustain themselves. By exploring these places and understanding how they have evolved into landscapes of leisure and work, production and consumption, habitation, and migration, and how they are impacted by the global political economy, national policies, local governance, and a host of other factors, we can develop more nuanced understanding of guestwork in U.S. tourism and hospitality. Unfortunately, the politics and policies that surround guestworker visas have largely neglected geography. The well-established problems associated with the H-2B visa cap are one example. A national scale policy that relies on particular deadlines to apply, even despite the attempts to solve the problem by splitting the cap into two halves of the year, creates a program where some business have a better chance to utilize it based on the start of their peak seasonal needs. Because this varies from place-to-place, local geography may determine if an employer misses out on hiring a worker because they are forced to stand in line behind other employers who are allowed to file before them. This has been the case for northern resorts with later start dates in the summer along with those in any other area where the local climate makes for an application filing season that is out of step with the majority of applicants who get to apply first. When the statutory cap on H-2B visas gets reached, they are simply out of luck. To some extent this blind spot to local geography is due to the very structure of governance in the United States, where the immigration policy is handled by the federal government while the individual states have very little to do with the management of guestworker programs outside the voice of individual legislators. Similarly, most calls to see the J-1 or H-2B programs curbed or cut altogether typically rely on nationwide statistics to make their point. Senator Tom Cotton, a staunch supporter of efforts to lower legal immigration, responded to increases to the H-2B cap by highlighting the high teen and youth unemployment rates for the entire country (Kilgore, 2019). Also, Daniel Costa, policy analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute argues, the fact that there is such high unemployment in the type of jobs typically held by H-2B workers proves that employer claims of workforce shortages are baseless. But he does so by solely focusing on national-level data in reference to the fact that the H-2B regulations say it can be used if workers cannot be found in this country. “Since the H-2B statute sets a national standard, it’s appropriate to look to national-level data on unemployment in major H-2B occupations to determine if there are indicators of a shortage. In a nutshell, DOL’s unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) paints a disastrous picture of mass joblessness for most lower-wage jobs” (Costa, 2021). Of course, this aspatial premise ignores the unevenness of labor markets across the United States or the impacts of seasonality as they exist in isolated settings across the country. It assumes that workers can just pick up and go as they like and will do so for a temporary job.

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This line of reasoning follows one of the biggest criticisms of guestworker programs, namely that they serve to depress wages, and if wages were allowed to rise then worker shortages would be alleviated as workers flock to now fairly paid jobs. At the most theoretical level, this neoclassical economic framing suggests that if people were only paid what the market will bear, eventually the labor market will respond with workers willing and ready to do the job as the supply and demand curves reach equilibrium. Unfortunately, this premise rests on the assumption that all workers are a homogenous group with the same motivations and no constraints on their mobility. The argument only really makes sense if one ignores the ways that labor markets actually function. In reality, labor markets are comprised of multiple groups of people varying by age, class, cultural background, and educational attainment levels, all dispersed unevenly across space. Furthermore, their relative levels of mobility are variously determined by a multitude of factors from those listed above to the availability of transportation, levels of social support, and the ways that government policies serve to enable or hinder their movement. All of these factors swirl together to slot workers in to various positions within a segmented labor market. This is not to say that the wage argument is completely without merit, as certainly there must be some wage that would attract people to even the worst jobs. Indeed, the reality is much more messy. On one hand, the shortages of tourism and hospitality workers following the pandemic has certainly highlighted the fact that employers will offer higher wages as they become more desperate. But simply because wages have been rising in lowskilled tourism positions, does not mean that people will actually take the job. In this vein, North Carolina golf resort manager, Craig described his efforts to pay more, specifically to attract quality workers: I’ve always paid way more than what most people do. I’m in a market where I can’t pay minimum wage. I’ve never done this. My approach is different than others. I’ve always paid people what they are worth, not what the market will bear. In other words, I didn’t bring these people in to get cheap labor. I brought these people in to get good labor.

It should be noted that Craig does hire local workers, but finds that even though he pays competitive wages for his area, it is necessary to supplement them with H-2Bs. This makes sense in context. The resort where Craig works is located in Highlands, an isolated mountain town in North Carolina, that has experienced heavy gentrification fueled by second home purchases over the past couple of decades. It has a year-round population of a little over 1,000, and a median age of almost 60. The median home sales price is over $500,000. The nearest “population center” is a town of 4,000, which is 30 minutes away along a winding mountain road. Even if wages were set high enough to attract seasonal workers, where would they live? In town the only affordable housing is already owned and used by another large resort to house its own employees.

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In a similar example, the past year in Jackson, Wyoming, was one in which businesses were forced to try to recruit within the United States due to the stoppage of both the H-2B and J-1. Because Jackson is a place with a great deal of appeal one of the major employers, Snow King Ski Resort, had no trouble actually finding young people to apply: ‘because of COVID and a lot of online learning, a lot of applicants are looking for in-person learning, they want face-to-face interactions with their teachers and peers, so they’ve made the decision to take a gap year,’ she said, ‘we are getting a lot of high-quality candidates applying to Snow King, which is great, but then it ultimately comes down to the housing situation.’ Ballard explained the connection between housing and employment levels, ‘we simply still do not have enough employees. I don’t see us ever getting to a point where we are completely hired for the winter,’ said Ballard, citing the ever-present housing issue. ‘The reality of what it takes to live and work here has turned a lot of people away, they start looking into the housing situation and before we know it they’re not coming out because they can’t find a place,’ she said. (Vallen, 2020)

These are only a couple examples of places where H-2Bs and/or J-1s may be found, but they serve to illustrate why it is much more important to establish that labor market shortages are locally specific and any attempts to reduce their use should be rooted in understanding and alleviating the very reasons that labor shortages exist in the first place. In this case, statistics that are based on the national scale are not really useful for demonstrating why human resource directors are desperate to see guestworker programs protected and expanded, and instead force us to view them with suspicious motives. This is not at all to suggest that either the H-2B or the J-1 have been free of the sort of workplace abuses that should make one suspicious. Indeed, as I have demonstrated in chapter seven, these have been features found and regulated against since their beginning. Further, some issues clearly remain that demand attention and calls for ongoing reforms. Even so this also does not mean that the programs are without merit. It is worth a moment to take stock of avenues for potential improvement.

Local Solutions? As I have established through this book, the fact that guestworkers in tourism tend to be so intensely clustered in particular areas is due to the mismatch between the availability of seasonal jobs and the supply of local workers. As has been demonstrated ad nauseum, the unsustainable explosion of housing costs and unavailability of workforce housing is a common feature throughout the country in seasonal tourismdependent areas. The two places where I have focused on this issue the most, Cape Cod/Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Jackson, Wyoming, both demonstrate the risks of

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waiting much too long to preserve affordable housing options for the local workforce. Both places are now fighting an uphill battle to build back to something resembling a healthy land and housing market. But the policies now in place or being attempted seem promising. Deed restrictions to keep housing affordable and in the hands of the local workforce is essential if local places wish to break out of the home price upward spiral. Also, the establishment of a land bank funded by real estate transfer fees that can be used to build or acquire affordable housing is a long-term solution that should help to alleviate housing stresses over time. Other seasonal tourism towns in the United States would be wise to pay heed to the lessons found in Jackson and Nantucket lest they find their local year-round community eroding away. On the other side of the housing issue is the question of how to provide adequate housing to seasonal workers. Even for those who would much rather see business recruit from within the United States exclusively, there is still an obvious need for housing in most places. Any seasonal workers recruited from outside the area still need a place to live, and if they are thrust into an already hyper-competitive housing market they would just add more stress on an already stressed system. In this context, the solution that the Village of Lake Delton/Dells Wisconsin found in partnering to build dormitory housing is so logical and obvious, it seems somewhat amazing that no other area of the country had yet to try it themselves. It has served as a model of effective local government efforts to secure or build housing for seasonal residents. In this case it mostly serves to house J-1 students, but could equally house any workers and therefore relieve stress across an entire area. Obviously, the dormitory has been key in improving the lives of J-1s working around Wisconsin Dells, and in making the SWT program more sustainable locally. But it should be reiterated that it was built because a number of local citizen actors took it upon themselves to make it happen. Similarly in other parts of the country, the SWT program works best when local citizens recognize the foreign students among them and begin to engage in their lives. The International Student Outreach Programs that have mostly emerged organically serve to provide critical social support that is sometimes lacking due to overtaxed, or neglectful sponsorship. When sponsors had not been fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the goals of the program and cultural exchange were being fulfilled, it was often ISOPs that stepped in to intervene with employers or with DOS to see that the rules were followed. Sylvia from the ISOP in Destin, Florida, described what happened after her organization began working with the students: So it’s getting better. We have literally had a couple of sponsors leave our area because we were requiring them to meet their obligations associated with the state department regulations. But it’s getting better, I want to say, now that they know our church is an advocate for these students, you don’t mess with them.

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At their best, ISOPs act as watchdogs over the program and keep everyone in line. But the fact that there are some outreach groups that have done remarkable work highlights the fact that there are many places in the United States where they are not active at all, even in areas with a large number of SWTs. Jackson, Wyoming, happens to be one of these places. Are student workers in those areas falling through the cracks? Are the ISOPs sometimes doing work that sponsors are really responsible for handling? Can ISOPs sustain themselves over time considering they are comprised entirely of volunteers that may eventually run out of steam if key members of the community start to fade away in their efforts? These questions are important in considering the long-term viability of the J-1 if ISOPs are viewed as partners in the Bridge USA programs.

Regulatory Reform and Possibilities So far I have mostly focused on initiatives or potential solutions people are working towards in local places, but places are more than simply fixed locations in space. They are also the embodiment of history and culture that give locations meaning and they are products of the processes flowing through them across multiple scales. In other words, laws, economic flows, and anything that is operating from outside a local area but still serves to shape a local place is worth examination. In this regard several policies at least merit potential for making tourism jobs more palatable to more workers. Aside from the historic problem of low pay is the seasonal nature of so many tourism and hospitality jobs. Dealing with seasonality from the perspective of labor may be helped by solutions that reside at scale of the entire country and shaped by state policy. Because seasonal work necessarily includes long stretches of unemployment, the question is how can workers be supported in the interim between jobs? Would social supports encourage workers to take jobs they might not otherwise consider if they know that work is only temporary? Things like universal basic income and de-linking healthcare from employment may at least theoretically give some workers the freedom to work temporarily without the looming fear of facing joblessness. While there have been some efforts to improve healthcare access, most notably through the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (known colloquially as Obamacare), after over a decade of opposition, incremental changes, and the fact that the original legislation was complicated and incomplete, the United States has a long way to go before it can claim anything close to universal healthcare coverage. But were the country to enact a single-payer system or something that removes the tight connection most workers feel between work and health insurance, it is possible to envision more people choosing a more nomadic lifestyle, shifting between seasonal jobs in different places. Whether or not these would effectively serve to help smooth over seasonal labor markets or not is an important question, and one worthy of future research.

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Even beyond the problem of finding seasonal workers, universally applicable policies like single-payer health insurance, universal basic income, cancellation of student debt, and drastically reduced costs for higher education all have potential ramifications for small businesses that may struggle to find core workers who might enjoy positions in hospitality and tourism were they able to afford to take them. On one hand a current university student who might take a seasonal job or even a parttime position during the school year has little chance of actually paying their way through college, a consequence of both 50 years of stagnating wages and tuition inflation. The alternative is to pay for school with loans. As it stands, a typical young American university graduate maintains an average debt load of almost $30,000 (Kerr & Wood, 2021). Considering that loans need to start being repaid within six months of graduation, former students have little choice but to enter the labor market as soon as possible. While in some ways this may be a gift to certain employers, others may not benefit nearly as much. Many smaller businesses that cannot necessarily offer competitive wages but may offer a satisfying working experience may have a harder time attracting quality workers who feel the need to earn as much as possible to escape their peonage. The same is true of other incentives like group health insurance that is often only available to workers at larger companies, a provision mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Even beyond current employers in tourism and hospitality is the potential effect such programs may have on spurring entrepreneurial efforts. If people with an idea for opening a business catering to a local tourism economy and know that their wages can only fall so far due to universal basic income and that they will not be sacrificing in the case of becoming ill, and that they might actually be able to attract other workers, they may be more willing to assume the risk. This is of course hypothetical but is based on a kernel of truth about tourism work and the tricky labor market in which it is embedded. Universal social programs have at least the potential to unluck labor markets and entrepreneurial spirit and are therefore worthy of a great deal of research to begin to understand if such speculation is realistic, or simply a pipe dream. But these are large questions that would involve massive shifts in national social policy and currently seem more like a thought exercise than something that is likely to happen any time soon. Real reforms that have the potential to make the J-1 and H-2B programs more effective for workers and employers alike lie in the rules and regulations written into law, which I have shown have been actively revised over the past decade. The H-2B program, the more heavily regulated of the two, is also the more problematic in its rigidity. Rules designed to protect American workforces as well as the foreign workers who come to the United States end up making the visa unwieldy to use for employers and more vulnerable to exploitation for the workers. The timeline that employers must follow to be able to prove a labor shortage bears little resemblance to actual hiring cycles and virtually guarantees that they will qualify for foreign labor certification. The H-2B rules effectively create their own demand on top

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of any actual demands that exist in the labor market. For the workers, being tied to a single employer places them in a precarious position relative to management. Without the ability to change employment or even work a second job while in the United States, the only recourse a worker has in an unfavorable job, is to go back home. For a migrant worker who has sacrificed so much of their time and energy in order to provide for their families, this is unacceptable. In other words, in the worst of circumstances, it is a recipe for exploitation. This is made all the more cruel by the fact that H-2Bs cannot be represented by lawyers that accept funding from Legal Services Corporation. Thus, when real issues do arise H-2B workers must find their own way to pay for legal aid. Finally, the H-2B does not allow for flexibility within the workplace. The job description as written on the application is the only job that is allowed to be performed by law. While this serves to protect the worker on one hand by disallowing a worker to be used in other random positions that may typically pay more, it also restricts them from possibly gaining more hours and experience in other areas of work. Management, on the other hand, has no ability to shift workers to needed tasks even if those positions pay the same amount. In short, the H-2B visa has a great deal of room for improvement. A reasonable question is also whether it should be scrapped altogether and have a new visa take its place. In fact, this is exactly what was proposed in the comprehensive immigration reform bill authored by the Bi-partisan “Gang of Eight” senators in 2013. The W visa as it was proposed would have made sweeping changes to the guestworker landscape in the country, but the bill died on the table and produced exactly no reform. That does not mean it cannot be revived. What should such a visa look like? Ultimately, if as Bruno (2017, p. 11) suggests, ‘Guestworker programs generally try to achieve two goals simultaneously: to be responsive to legitimate employer needs for temporary labor and to provide adequate protections for U.S. and foreign temporary workers,’ then a replacement for or update to the H-2B would need two main improvements. The first is to de-link workers from a single employer by creating something like a pool of certified workers who would be accessible to employers who can prove their own labor shortage. Employers would be required to choose workers from such a pool, once certified to do so. If a worker decides to leave one employer, they may freely choose to do so. The W visa included this sort of portability, stating that a nonimmigrant admitted and employed by a registered employer may quit for any reason and find another registered employer (Title IV, Subtitle G § 4702). The goal from the employer end would also be to reduce the bureaucracy associated with becoming certified, in particular shortening the time frame between when the shortage would be provable and when the worker is needed, so that the demonstrated need is actually current. The W visa would have done this by shifting to an attestation model in which an employer could attest to the need by stating that no other employees would be adversely affected, that qualified workers could not be found, that they have not recently laid off people in the same jobs and that

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workers are not on strike. The attestation model had previously been tested with the H-2B and was changed after too many cases of fraud were discovered by employers lying about their needs. Furthermore, this would have ended the major role of the Department of Labor in ensuring the balancing the needs of both domestic and transnational workers (Bowman & Bair, 2017). Among the other potential benefits of the W visa as it was envisioned was the creation of a pathway to citizenship. Currently this is not part of the H-2B visa, and so anyone who is working in the United States and contributing to the country’s economy is not given credit in the immigration process as it stands today. This is not to suggest that all guestworkers have the ultimate goal of U.S. citizenship or even permanent residence in the United States, indeed some are happy to come, work, and return to the places where they have always lived. There are some, however, who would like that opportunity and should be given credit for their time spent at work and contributing to the economy of the United States. Further, any plan crafted in this manner should also consider evidence from other international contexts where low-skilled temporary migration was given a similar pathway to citizenship. In Canada for example, non-immigrant workers admitted under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program do have the ability to potentially work their way towards citizenship. However, the process is uneven and biased toward workers with higher skill levels. Low-skilled workers are not eligible for several of the programs that qualify higher-skilled workers to apply for permanent residence through the Express Entry an application management system. Rather the only real method of gaining permanent residency is through the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP). Employers nominate workers with rule that differ based upon specific economic and labor in each province, and the provinces in turn nominate chose prospective immigrants for permanent status (Fudge & MacPhail, 2009, p. 23). This process gives an inordinate amount of power to employers who are able to leverage their ability to nominate workers for high levels of productivity and commitment rather than other normal employment conditions. In this system, “Employers function as gatekeepers to permanent residence for migrant workers admitted under the TFWP and the PNP creates fierce competition among workers to be chosen for nomination” (Fudge & Tham, 2017). In short, there are lessons to be learned in other temporary foreign worker programs that should be heeded in the design and implementation of any future schemes to provide credit under any merit-based immigration reforms. This is the case in terms of creating pathways to permanent residence or citizenship as it is for all facets of guestworker programs made or altered with immigration reforms. An investigation of the lessons from other countries is well beyond the scope of this book, but clearly even a shallow dive into foreign programs suggests there are successes and failures that can illuminate the ongoing process of revision in the United States. Reforms to the J-1 programs are also ongoing, and it is clear that the Department of State has been active over the past decade in efforts to improve the program

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for its participants. While the sponsors are the entities that bear responsibility for student workers when they come to the United States, in the past many of the problems associated with J-1 programs have clearly been a result of sponsors that have failed to properly vet employers, third party recruiters, housing, or cultural exchange possibilities. One of the most successful actions has been the suspension of sponsors that failed to follow the provisions set forth in the laws governing the Summer Work Travel program, as well as the moratorium on any new sponsors. The moratorium seems to have been effective in allowing time for DOS to take stock of how well the current set of sponsors have managed the SWT program. The process has essentially pared back the group to a trusted set of institutions. The other major reform was to ban the use of J-1 workers in certain types of jobs where they will receive little interaction with Americans, such as in factories and warehouses. But the regulations also clearly state that certain positions, such as housekeeping, require particularly scrutiny and care when placing SWTs. It seems that this ambiguity in language is largely ignored considering the amount of SWTs I met cleaning rooms in places like Myrtle Beach. While housekeeping work is certainly a major need in hotels as those positions remain chronically understaffed, they often seem inappropriate for the purposes of cultural exchange. The ability to interact with Americans is limited and the work is often extremely stressful and best left to someone who understands that prior to arrival. Adding housekeeping to the list of banned jobs would limit the pool of international workers available to employers to the H-2B, but also perhaps incentivize them to improve conditions for housekeepers in order to better recruit locally (within the constraints already established above). Simply because a shortage exists in a particular field of work does not mean that students in the country for the purpose of cultural exchange should be doing them. Housekeeping is one of those positions, but further ongoing review is necessary to ensure that other seasonal positions are appropriate types of jobs for international students. Another concern is that clearly sponsors have allowed students to cluster in places where local businesses have become particularly reliant on their presence during peak seasons. The interim final rule published in 2012 stipulates clearly that placement of Summer Work and Travel participants must not create an over-concentration in places. Yet, across the country, this is exactly what has happened. Part of the problem may be that “over-concentration” is not defined. In places like Wisconsin Dells, Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, and a host of other seasonal tourism destinations, SWTs have been highly concentrated, to the point that the majority of their interactions are with other SWTs. Were outreach not involved as volunteers in some locations, it is doubtful that many of these workers would have meaningful time spent with Americans. Clearly these workers are in high demand, but it seems that policies that would spur further dispersion of SWTs would at least serve to give them a broader sense of American culture. Admittedly this may make for a larger challenge to make sure that these BridgeUSA students are properly monitored, but then again

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the challenge to make sure they are housed properly is a made more difficult because they are so highly concentrated. With continual updates to these policies, it is imperative that the Department of State continues to improve on regulations to create a balance between the needs of local places, employers, and the cultural exchange imperative of the program.

Limitations and Future Research Opportunities My goal with this book has been to give the topic of guest work in tourism and hospitality the proper holistic view that it is due. In my estimation, to fully understand not only how the H-2B and the J-1 have become so embedded in the staffing equation of seasonal tourism and hospitality businesses but also how workers and managers experience them requires an integrative assessment. This means understanding how multiple scales of governance, political economies, and the positions of a wide array of stakeholders shape relationships and processes as they are implicated in particular places. After several years of working with as many of these facets of these guestworker visas as possible, I feel strongly in the validity of the analysis that is presented here. That said, there are veins of research I would have liked to have perused more fully given more time and fewer budgetary constraints. Indeed, some of the themes such as housing and precarity could very well have their own monograph length study and probably should at some point. One area that relates to this project, yet was not the basis for it, is the relationship between undocumented workers and those working through legally sanctioned guestworker programs. This lacuna in the present study can be accounted for both in terms of the focus of the research and overall constraints of time and budget. A question one may ask is why these businesses in these places are not simply plugging in undocumented workers to fill the gap? This question assumes that undocumented workers are in abundance in all places and are readily available on demand. This is simply not the case. In fact, the constraints found on workforce housing for local citizen workers, guestworkers, and undocumented workers alike. Especially in places that are extremely remote with very small year-round populations, there will not be many workers of any kind available at the seasonal peak. Furthermore, many of the positions filled by J-1 and H-2B workers are public facing and require English proficiency. Considering that much of the undocumented workforce would be very conspicuous in such positions and would simply not match with the required language skills needed for even a typical Summer Work Travel job, it would be surprising to find undocumented workers in any significant numbers. Other higher-end resorts that typically hire H-2B workforces are also very cautious of their brand image, and according to anecdotal reports, fear the consequences of being caught hiring unauthorized migrants. Furthermore, as noted throughout the present work, many of

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these resorts are looking for people with skills and professionalism that may simply not be met in the undocumented labor market. Still some areas of research that connect to this topic require further investigation. One of these was the lack of the labor union perspective into the H-2B and J-1 Bridges programs. Despite my best efforts to contact several service-employee unions with requests for an interview, I was met with silence. This is unfortunate, considering the role they seem to have played in supporting the efforts of the National Guestworker Alliance in its efforts to organize the students at the Hershey plant in 2011 (Preston, 2011b). That action directly led to the sweeping changes in the Summer Work Travel program that have undoubtedly been positive in reforming how it is used by employers. Furthermore, unions will undoubtedly have a voice in any political discussions aimed at comprehensive immigration reforms, if and when it ever occurs. How unions frame the debate around the structure of guestworker visas will likely hold weight with some politicians, academics, and the media. The same was true of government agencies, especially the Department of Labor. In contrast, key staffers from the Department of State were more generous, if not going on record with their words, were very helpful in providing information and a glimpse into the how they interface with sponsors and employers. This allowed me to get a better sense of how policies play out in the relationship between organizations of state and private actors. This was ultimately not a fatal flaw in the study as the actions of DOL typically speak for themselves. However, more information from that side of the H-2B process could have been enlightening. Finally, the new Northern Triangle carve-out with the 2021 H-2B cap extension was a very recent development at the time of this writing. How it functions both as a geopolitical tool as well as means of tamping down domestic political pressures associated with the migration of refuge seekers at the border remains to be seen. Likewise, how well recruitment from countries with a legacy of public corruption is handled by the U.S. government, private recruiters, and the national governments of the region are all in question and worthy of attention going forward.

Final Assessment The new era of guest worker programs can anticipate and deal with the distortion and dependence that caused earlier programs to end under a cloud. Recognizing that economic incentives can reinforce program rules and including these incentives in twenty-first-century guest worker programs can help ensure that guest workers do not become permanent features of the landscape in sending and receiving countries. (P. Martin, 2007)

In my time conducting and reflecting on the research presented in this book, I have often been asked what I think about the H-2B and J-1 programs. Do I think they are good for workers or bad for workers? Do I think they are just exercises in exploitation? Is it just the government bowing to the whims of capital? Do I believe they are taking

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the jobs of willing American workers? Only on this last question do I feel comfortable committing to an answer after a lengthy analysis. Throughout this work I have taken a deliberately spatial approach in attempting to understand the geographies of guestworker in a landscape of seasonal tourism in the United States. The areas where H-2Bs and J-1s are in their greatest concentrations it is safe to say that these guestworkers are largely not displacing American workers. These are places that have developed over time to have distinctly cyclical economies where the rhythms of life and work are not easily comparable to the year-round economies found most other places in the country. Most of them share some combination of isolation, gentrification, lack of workforce housing, tourism demand fluctuations, poor public transportation, and small yearround populations. It is not at all surprising that worker shortages exist for low-paying seasonal jobs in these particular places. However, this is not an absolute and it is entirely possible that in some places the easy ability to find J-1 student workers may allow employers to rely too heavily on them rather than attempt to find innovative solutions to recruitment in other areas of the country. High concentrations of J-1 workers are antithetical to the purposes of the program anyway, and thus continual scrutiny in the places where they find the heaviest use is a policy that may help assuage the concerns of those fearing displacement and of those fearing J-1 exploitation. The H-2B program, on the other hand, is expensive and unwieldy to use in practice. I have gotten the distinct impression throughout my many conversations that while managers love the commitment and work ethic of the H-2B workers, it would be much easier for them if they could recruit locally. The truth is that my geographic analysis of the J-1 and H-2B programs have required me to better understand the good and the bad in each. To be sure, not all tourism workers entering the country on the J-1 and H-2B have had largely negative experiences when working in the United States. Most of the J-1 workers I met were enjoying their time living and working as SWT participants. I even admit to continually imagining myself at that age and feeling a twinge of envy. As someone who did study in another country for an entire semester, I look back fondly on that time and remember how transformative it was for me. And that is precisely the reason it should be preserved and continually reformed to ensure that its cultural exchange properties never come secondary to those associated with work. Admittedly, the fewer H-2B workers I met were experiencing more stress and dissatisfaction with their housing and job circumstances. Between stories told by their advocates, journalists, and even employers, the potential for these to happen is present and something that has led critics toward continual calls for changes to how the programs are designed. The H-2B visa is far from perfect, but at the same time does give workers an ability to earn an income not available to them back home while satisfying labor demands that have employers begging the state to find solutions to the mismatch with labor availability. Is the act of creating places of play, pleasure, and leisure done at the cost of insecurity and precarity for imported workforces? Unfortunately, the short answer

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is that sometimes it is. But with proper reforms and closer attention to how precarity becomes baked into the rules, it is possible to develop regulations that allow employers and workers to overcome the unevenness of the tourism labor market landscape. In the end, to produce healthy tourism geographies, requires geographic solutions.

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List of Abbreviations BLS DHS DOL DOS ECA ETA EVP HAC IRCA ISOP LSC SWT USCIS USIA WHD

Bureau of Labor Statistics Department of Homeland Security U.S. Department of Labor U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Department of State Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor Exchange Visitor Program Housing Appeals Committee, Massachusetts Immigration Reform and Control Act International Student Outreach Program Legal Services Corporation J-1 Summer Work Travel Program U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services United States Information Agency Wage and Hour Division, Department of Labor

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List of Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 6.1 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 8.3 Figure 8.4

J-1 Summer Work and Travel & H-2B Issuances 2002–2020 6 J-1 and H-2B Guestworkers 2021 7 Guestworker Hotspots by County 2016 21 Teen Labor Force Participation Rate and J-1 Visa Issuances 1992–2019 “The Grand Strand” 84 Percentage African American by Postal Code, 2018 86 Jackson Wyoming Homes, Old and New 93 Redmond Street Rentals 99 Grocery Store Employee Housing 100 Historical downtown area of Nantucket 110 The Byzantine Nature of the H-2B Hiring Process 118 Two typical motels in the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina “J-1 Ghetto” Chimney Cove Village Apartments 147 H-2B Apartment Myrtle Beach, South Carolina 148 Lake Delmont 175 Wisconsin Dells 175 Hiawatha Residence Hall 178 Hiawatha Residence Hall Dormitories 179

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72

143

Index Affordable Care Act 163, 199–200 African American workers 34–35, 49, 57, 85–86 AirBNB 82–83, 100 Black Workers see African American Workers Bracero Program 18, 48–58, 61, 119, 187 British West Indies Temporary Alien Labor Program 56, 186 Canadian Guestworker Programs 43–44, 202 Cape Cod, Massachusetts 4, 14, 21, 23, 26, 69, 101, 104–108, 112, 123–124, 136, 145, 171, 177, 181, 184–185, 193, 197 Catskill Mountains Resorts 39–40 Commuting 83, 85–86, 94–96, 145, 192 Contingent Work 30–31, 65 COVID-19 6, 72, 81, 83, 166–169, 172, 188, 191–194, 197 Cruise Industry 12, 19, 24, 31–32, 39, 45 Department of Labor, United States 20–21, 51, 53, 69, 116–125, 128–133, 150–152, 159, 164, 166, 168, 172–173, 202, 205 Department of State, United States 20–21, 63–64, 114–115, 117–118, 125, 140, 155–156, 166, 172, 179, 186, 198, 203–205 Destin, Florida 4, 139–140, 198

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina 4, 20, 84–86, 146–147, 155 Housing – Affordable Workforce Housing Shortages 10, 22–24, 91–93, 144–146, 156, 161, 179, 181–186, 192, 197–198, 204 – Expensive Housing Markets 21, 91–93, 110, 158, 197–198 – Guest Worker Housing 20, 23, 51, 56–59, 124, 127, 138, 141–148, 156, 158, 175–180, 198 Human Resources 7, 10, 19–20, 23, 65–70, 75, 79, 123–126, 129, 130, 132, 134–136, 162, 171, 193, 197 Human Trafficking 8, 47, 150–151, 156 Illegal Aliens see Undocumented Workers Immigration Reform and Control Act 57–58, 65 International Student Outreach Programs 23, 111, 138–145, 148–149, 156, 175, 179, 198–199 J-1 Program Sponsors 17, 62–63, 75, 114–117, 124–125, 135, 138–140, 146–147, 150, 154–157, 176–178, 198–199, 203, 205 Jackson, Wyoming 21, 23, 71, 89–101, 112, 129, 135–136, 145, 162, 177, 197–199 Jamaica 16, 67, 124, 158 Jamaican workers 10, 16, 56, 58, 67, 146–148, 150, 157–158

East Asian Guestworker Programs 44–45 Flexibility 29–32, 55. 75, 77, 130–131, 201 Fulbright – Senator J. William Fulbright 59–60, 114 – Fulbright Act 60–62, 114 Gentrification 23–24, 81–82, 84, 91–93, 109, 161, 196, 206 German Gastarbeiter Program 9, 43 Gulf States Guestworker Programs 45–46 Gullah people 84–85 H-2B Visa Cap 6, 57, 120–123, 132–134, 162, 170–172, 188–189, 195, 205 Hershey’s 155–156, 205

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Labor Recruitment 17, 19, 37, 45, 69, 75, 123–124, 137, 152–153, 173, 203, 205 Labor Union 30, 205 Legal Services Corporation 159, 163–165 Mexico 3, 18, 23, 48–58, 153, 168, 186–189 Mexican Farm Labor Program see Bracero Program Mita 42 Mobility 9–10, 14–18, 24, 35–38, 41, 47, 131, 137, 158, 187, 194–196 Myrtle Beach, South Carolina 10, 20, 65–67, 74, 78, 82, 108, 125, 136–139, 142–144, 147–148, 150–151, 154, 157, 176, 180, 193, 203

232

Index

Nantucket 21, 23, 26, 78, 102, 103–113, 136, 145, 180–186, 197–198 Northern Triangle 161, 187–190, 205 Obama, Barack 128, 152, 163, 170, 186 Padrone Labor System 46–47, 51 Philippines 18–19, 45, 48, 60, 125 Pigeon Forge, Tennessee 20, 27–28, 139–140, 176 Place (concept) 12–14 Political Lobbying 8, 161–172, 185 Precarity and precarious labor 8, 30–32, 35–37, 47, 59, 65, 89, 94, 100, 106–107, 116, 136–160, 193–194, 201, 204, 206–207 Reagan, Ronald 164 Seasonality 5, 27–30, 54, 70, 94–95, 106–111, 132, 174, 191–193, 194–197, 199 Ski Industry 4, 10, 12, 75, 88, 92, 125, 129–130, 132, 135, 141, 168, 191, 197

Slave Labor 84 Transportation System 3, 51, 83, 84–86, 138–139, 146–147, 194, 196, 206 Trump, Donald 121, 134, 163, 166–173, 186–189 Undocumented Workers 3, 50–53, 55, 57–58, 163–165, 187, 204–205 VRBO 82, 100 Wages 15–16, 26, 38, 41, 47, 49–59, 69, 73–74, 79, 81, 85, 92, 116, 119–120, 128–132, 147, 150, 157–158, 169, 187, 193, 196, 200 Wisconsin Dells/Lake Delmont, Wisconsin 4, 19, 21, 148–149, 155, 174–180, 198, 203 Youth Employment 3–5, 39–41, 61, 70–75, 108, 126–127, 167, 191, 197, 200