As Trump squeezes immigrant workforce, employers seek relief

The anxiety reflects a deep uncertainty about where President Donald Trump is headed on legal immigration programs, both temporary and permanent, as the administration ramps up deportations and moves to end the legal status of millions who arrived in recent years.

In recent weeks, managers of the nation's resorts, plant nurseries, fish processors and racetracks started getting very worried.

The Trump administration had yet to release a batch of H-2B visas -- those available for seasonal businesses that often can't find enough workers domestically to fulfill demand.

Usually, the Department of Homeland Security releases them a few days after receiving more applications than the number of visas allowed for the second half of the year. That cap was reached March 5, but no announcement came. Industry lobbyists got members of Congress to reach out on their behalf, put on a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago and sent a letter urging the administration to continue issuing the visas.

"It needs to be done by April 1, otherwise we all get backed up," said Greg Chiecko, the president of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association, which represents traveling carnival producers. "We've heard that they're going to, but they're being very deliberate in waiting a little bit."

Finally, last Wednesday, a news release announced that the visas would continue to flow, allowing businesses that banked on having them for the summer to move forward with their plans.

But the anxiety reflected a deep uncertainty about where President Donald Trump is headed on legal immigration programs, both temporary and permanent, as the administration ramps up deportations and moves to end the legal status of millions who arrived in recent years. Those actions will squeeze the labor supply that many employers depend on -- and they're using the crackdown to argue for broader channels for people to come and work.

Last week, the American Business Immigration Coalition -- a group representing employers of immigrants -- gathered its members in Washington to plead their case with lawmakers. Their refrain: Congress can both stop illegal migration and bring more people in legally, as well as give those already here a chance to stay.

The organisation's chair, Bob Worsley, runs a modular housing construction firm in Arizona, where he has long struggled to find enough workers. A Republican, he won a state Senate seat in 2012 in part to oppose further immigrant crackdowns in the state after several high-profile efforts.

"This is kind of like a dam that's holding back water -- the water is going to find a way to get past the dam, just by sheer force," Worsley said. "You can secure the border, but if you don't fix immigration so people can come legally, it will happen again."

Trump has said he's willing to let in more people legally, and he is a frequent user of short-term employment visas at his resorts, golf clubs and winery. Nevertheless, as with other plans for immigration policy beyond the current focus on enforcement, the administration's intentions remain cloudy. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

A powerful restrictionist contingent in the White House led by Stephen Miller, a deputy chief of staff, has argued that letting people in even on a controlled, temporary basis hasn't adequately protected domestic workers. (The Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group for civil rights, has long criticised the programs as well.)

Project 2025, the blueprint drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation that the administration has so far largely followed, recommends winding down the H-2A and H-2B visas, which are often called guest-worker visas and are good for up to 10 months. Instead, the document proposed encouraging employers to invest in automation instead.

But Worsley's group sees an opening, once Trump is satisfied with his progress on enforcement and Congress has dealt with a raft of expiring tax cuts, to expand temporary worker visas and to create a path to legal status for millions of people who have lived in the United States without legal status for years.

The group organised a news conference last week to celebrate the reintroduction of key legislation and to make the Republican argument for passing it.

One bill, endorsed by the United Farm Workers union, would allow some agricultural workers to stay in the United States legally, as well as provide more flexible terms for those with work visas.

A sponsor of the measure, Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican who owns an 850-acre farm in Washington state, said his colleagues had felt unable to act while the border remained chaotic. "That excuse no longer exists," Newhouse said. "I truly think this is the Congress that we can make it happen."

Rep. María Salazar, R-Fla., proposed something more sweeping: the Dignity Act, which would create a path to legal residence for workers lacking lawful immigration status, reform existing visa programs and beef up border security. The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed the bill last fall, and Salazar argues that it does enough for all sides to gather majority support.

"That's the Christian thing to do, that's the right thing to do, that's the Republican thing to do," she said, while praising the president's enforcement agenda and what she thinks is his desire to negotiate a grand bargain. "Trump will be for immigration what Reagan was for communism," she said.

Such an agreement has long eluded lawmakers, and the repeated failure of comprehensive change has pushed most constituencies to acknowledge that piecemeal actions may be necessary.

That could start with a fix for the people brought to the United States as children who are currently shielded from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which polls well even among Republicans. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who heads the House Judiciary Committee, has said immigration reforms including help for the Dreamers, as they're known, could follow the tax bill currently being negotiated.

Massey Villarreal has seen many of these fights before. A Texas Republican who advised former President George W. Bush on immigration issues, he runs a technology firm and recently finished a term as chair of the Texas Association of Business, the state's largest chamber of commerce. To him, the country has steadily moved away from the more welcoming immigration system he would like to see.

In this volatile political environment, however, that trajectory could change quickly. One way Trump may be persuaded to support such an overhaul, Villarreal said, is if he could claim credit for a historic achievement, rather than an incremental fix.

"This president likes to do his own thing," Villarreal said. "The way this administration has rolled down the line, I think there's going to be a whole revamping of this process."

In the meantime, the administration is taking actions that could constrain the workforce on farms, construction sites, production lines and resort properties in a way that may become impossible to ignore.

Although the pace of deportations has so far been slow, the White House has been ending temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of people who entered the country in recent years, and marshaling resources to round them up.

"As more and more people lose their work permits, they get deported or they don't go to work because they're afraid to leave their house, more and more employers are going to be screaming," said Richard Herman, an immigration attorney in Cleveland.

Seasonal employers have become increasingly dependent on guest visas in recent years. The H-2A program for agricultural workers is uncapped, and the Department of Labor certified about 385,000 positions last year, up from 258,000 in 2019. (The State Department usually ends up issuing visas for about 80% of the certified positions.) Florida, which requires the use of E-Verify to block immigrants lacking permanent legal status from employment, uses more visas than any other state; crops like citrus employ H-2A workers almost exclusively.

Steve Scaroni, who owns a company that provides H-2A workers to growers in California and Arizona, said he had seen a small uptick in demand from clients, adding that he was "cautiously optimistic" that Trump's stepped-up enforcement efforts would send more business his way. But H-2A workers can replace only so many of the 283,000 or so immigrants lacking permanent legal status who currently work in agriculture.

"If all of a sudden people start asking me for H-2A workers, I will hit my ceiling, because I won't have enough housing," Scaroni said. "All my competitors that do H-2A, we're all in the same boat. There is a limit."

The H-2B program, which provides seasonal workers to industries other than agriculture, does have a cap. Applications for the approximately 130,000 slots available annually -- if the White House fully allocates the 64,716 visas on top of the 66,000 allowed by statute -- have far outstripped demand in recent years, and are distributed through a lottery. In 2024, the Labor Department certified applications for 243,798 positions after determining that domestic workers were not available to fill them.

The industries that depend on the program want the cap removed, or at least for it not to count against workers who return year after year.

Right now, those making the rounds on Capitol Hill are finding little appetite to engage on the specifics of legal immigration reform. Republican lawmakers are waiting for a signal from the White House, which so far has offered little indication of its preferences.

"A lot will say they stand with us, but are waiting for the president to give them some sort of direction," said George Carrillo, the CEO of the Hispanic Construction Council. "The moment he can say something positive, we have to jump on it."