Despite a cascade of anti-immigrant actions by the Trump administration over the past year and change, most of the immigrant workers the Outer Cape relies on each summer are on their way.
That's according to Paul Benson of the Provincetown Independent.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with Paul recently to learn more.
Gilda Geist Can you tell us about the two main visa programs that allow immigrants to come to the Outer Cape for work each summer?
Paul Benson Sure. We're talking about the H-2B visa, which is a temporary seasonal visa, not for immigration. It's for coming here to work, typically in hotels, restaurants, certain jobs that are hard to hire, like dishwashers and landscapers. And we're also talking about to J-1, which is a exchange visa. It's run through the State Department. It is for overseas college students. It allows them to come to America in their academic summer, work here, travel for about a month after their work season is over and then go back home and go school. And the H-2B and the J-1 collectively, we're talking about thousands of people who come to the Outer Cape, largely from certain countries. Areas will tend to cluster, so there's a lot of Jamaicans who use the H-2B visa, and there's lot of people from the Balkan Peninsula, especially Bulgaria, who use J-1 visa to come to Cape Cod.
GG How much do local businesses on the Outer Cape rely on this immigrant labor? And were there concerns this year that immigration policy coming down from the federal level could jeopardize that labor ecosystem?
PB Yes, it is a program that employers here really rely on, especially for certain hard to fill jobs like retail cashier. It tends to be a lot of J-1s, maybe the front of the house in a hotel, the check-in might be J-1, a lot housekeepers are coming through H-2B, as well as a lot prep cooks and dishwashers. Part of the situation is that American college students tend to be doing less working in the summer than they used to. There's a lot different reasons for that, but one is it's very hard to earn much of your tuition here. But if you're going back to the Balkan Peninsula where the exchange rates are incredibly favorable, the J-1 students who are coming here from Bulgaria can pay their entire year's college in 12 weeks of work here, so they're a very motivated and very excited workforce. It's also their first time away from home and the students who come here on that program have a really great time here.
GG How have Trump administration policies impacted the process for these immigrant workers to come to the United States?
PB Right, so we've seen some really significant disruptions, especially last year. There was a big slowdown in H-2B that threw almost 30,000 visas into doubt. They wound up coming through, sort of at the last second. This year, things have been really remarkably steady, even despite a lot of changes in other parts of the immigration system. These two programs have been working out. A lot of what happens at J-1 depends on individual embassies, so we actually were calling specific people who work in Jamaica and in Bulgaria to find out how the interviews were getting scheduled. And in those two countries that are the ones the Outer Cape relies on, it's been very smooth. There are other countries like Turkey and Serbia, [which have seen] almost the total shutdown of the interview process. Very few visa workers will be making it through from certain countries. But for the Outer Cape, for the businesses that we cover and for the communities that we report on as they're here in the [summer] season, they are going to be here again this summer, despite all of the chaos in various parts of Homeland Security and the State Department.
GG Can you talk a little bit about the social media checks?
PB Right. The social media checks began specifically for college students. There was this crackdown on speech related to Palestine. You saw a lot of college students and graduate students being picked up in immigration detention for things they'd said in op-eds. And the social media check originally were really searching for Palestine, Gaza, Israel, and looking for what students had had to say about that. This year, it doesn't seem to be operating in the same way. The people who are on the ground in Bulgaria say that hardly anyone is flunking these social media checks. We can't say that it's being implemented the same way in every country, but in the countries that are sending workers to the Outer Cape, we're not hearing about large numbers of students or H-2B workers being denied a chance to return here—because a lot of people do come year after year through this program—because of what's happening with social media checks. So that was really interesting.
