Texas needs to advocate for more foreign workers | Opinion
to find labor through the federal H-2A guest farm worker program.
“No one turns to this program because it’s a cheap and easy way to get labor,” said Anique Watson, an official with a Wylie-based agency that helps companies navigate guest worker programs.Most seasonal farm workers — around 370,000 certified jobs in 2022 – go to California, Florida and Georgia, but Texas leads the demand for nonagricultural visas for unskilled workers, under the H-2B program. These visas are even harder to obtain.
Meanwhile, highly skilled workers with college degrees have filed more than 750,000 applications in a competition for 85,000 visa slots in 2024. Labor shortages are one of the reasons the Federal Reserve is likely to keep interest rates high even as inflation has receded. With a jump in retirements and a drop in legal migration, employers are looking at a smaller pool of workers and having to keep raising wages, particularly for labor-intensive jobs in restaurants, hotels and retail stores.
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