A new analysis finds that New Hampshire's tourism, hospitality and landscaping businesses rely on seasonal foreign workers with work visas to a greater extent than most other states.
The report from Manifest Law, a New York-based immigration law firm, finds the state has one of the highest concentrations of requests for H-2B visas in the country. New Hampshire employers who work in tourism, hospitality, landscaping and construction say they don’t have enough U.S. employees to fill their vacancies during busy seasons.
“We are actually trying to fill the roles with U.S. workers,” said Bridget McKerley, the director of human resources for Duprey Hospitality. The company owns several hotels in Concord and recruits workers from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala through the H-2B program.
Tourists bring in billions of dollars of revenue for the state, and the industry needs to fill many seasonal, entry-level roles like maids, servers and maintenance staff.
The H-2B visa program allows U.S. businesses to bring foreign nationals to the country for temporary, non-agricultural jobs. Employers have to pay for the visas and travel costs, including flights, for their seasonal foreign workers in the visa program, but they can charge their employees for lodging. Employees are paid a wage determined by the
U.S. Department of Labor as similar to what other workers in that position and area are paid.
McKerley said Duprey Hospitality’s H-2B visa holders work as room attendants who clean guest’s rooms. These are roles the company is constantly looking for employees to fill, but they also struggle to hire servers, maintenance workers and other entry-level positions.
Duprey Hospitality sees a spike in guests from April to the end of October largely from tourists attending weddings in the summer and leaf peeping in the fall.
“If we can't fill the positions with U.S. workers, and if we can't fill those positions with H-2B, we will have to shut hotels down because we won't be able to turn them over,” McKerley said.
New England overall relies on the H-2B visa program more than any other region in the country. Seasonal farm workers who travel to agricultural regions do so under a different visa program, called the H-2A visa.
New Hampshire and other New England states depend on these workers for landscaping and hospitality, but also forest conservation, seafood processing and amusement parks. According to Manifest Law, persistent shortages of U.S. workers in these industries may be due to an aging domestic workforce and low participation in physically demanding jobs.
