Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS -- (Senate - February 10, 2005)

Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, I rise in support of the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act being introduced by Senator Mikulski today. This legislation offers a measured approach to provide needed relief to the many small businesses that have been struggling to find enough employees to operate during seasonal spikes in workload. Small businesses that are seasonal often need a large number of employees for a short portion of the year, but cannot afford to retain the same number of people as full-time, year-round employees. They instead must rely on temporary workers to fill the gap in their high season. In my home State of Maryland, for example, our seafood processors are busy in the summer and early fall, but have very little work in the winter. To accommodate this changing need, they hire college students and local residents as extra workers in the summer. But even with those workers they often find themselves short-staffed. So they turn to temporary employees who are willing to leave their home countries for a few months to come to the U.S. and work.

Specifically, the bill being introduced today will allow anyone who has had an H-2B visa for one of the last 3 years to return this summer or next if an employer petitions for them to do so. Importantly, employers still must demonstrate that they have tried and failed to find available, qualified U.S. citizens to fill these jobs before they file an H-2B visa application. In addition, the bill would ensure that our summer employers are not disadvantaged by allowing no more than half of the 66,000 visas to be allocated in the first half of the year. Finally, the bill imposes antifraud fees on employers who willfully misrepresent any statement on their H-2B petition and requires the Department of Homeland Security to file reports on the demographics of those utilizing the H-2B program.

Any changes to our immigration laws must balance the interests of U.S. citizens and our economy while providing a fair, legal framework for those seeking to come to our Nation from other countries. For example, our current immigration laws already contain several general reasons an alien seeking admission into the United States may be denied entry: security and terrorist concerns, health-related grounds, criminal history, public charge, i.e., indigence, seeking to work without proper labor certification, illegal entry and/or immigration law violations, lack of proper documents, ineligibility for citizenship, and previous removal. Ensuring the safety of our country requires preserving these categories.

This legislation would leave this existing framework intact. It simply provides a fair and equitable means of distributing a very scarce number of visas so that all employers who require extra assistance during one season of the year may obtain that assistance. We must resist the temptation to let the H-2B situation and the small businesses affected by it become entangled in the larger debate over immigration reform. Workers who use H-2B visas come to the U.S. for a temporary period of time and are required to leave when that time period has run. These workers respect our laws, work hard, provide services that benefit our economy, and then return to their families at the end of the season. For their sake and that of the small, seasonal businesses that rely on them, we need to resolve this H-2B crisis soon.

Without this fix, our seafood processors cannot operate at full capacity. That becomes a problem for the rest of the seafood industry, including our watermen, who will be forced to curtail their fishing because of an insufficient number of locations to process their catches. In the end, the people who suffer are not the seafood processors or the temporary workers but the watermen who cannot feed their families. This bill provides the assistance necessary to keep our watermen, seafood processors, and a number of other industries such as landscapers, pool operators, and summer camps working at full capacity this summer. I urge my colleagues to support its passage.

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