Seen in the Washington Wire blog at the Wall Street Journal:
Congress allows 66,000 H-2B visas yearly, but issues half of them in the first half of the fiscal year for winter employers and half after April 1 for employers who need workers in the summer. Seasonal employers have come to depend on the visas, which allow them to hire low-skilled workers from overseas. That means the visas have been snatched up earlier and earlier every year, and this year disappeared before the year officially began.
The post notes that an additional drain on the system was the expiration of an exemption for former H-2B recipients having failed to have been renewed in the immigration Brouhaha earlier this year.
With demand so high, and the quotas so low, is it any wonder that there is such an incentive for some businesses to tolerate the presence of undocumented immigrants in the country?