The Rodeo and the immigrants

Interesting story about who’s working the carnival midway.

Why, you might wonder, is a South African working at the Houston rodeo’s midway?

“The American workforce is not interested in this kind of work,” said Chris Lopez, vice president of carnival provider Ray Cammack Shows (RCS). “We couldn’t do it without these folks.”

Condon is one of the 300 foreign workers RCS employs to run midways for fairs across the U.S. (The crew also includes a few U.S.-born workers, but they are significantly outnumbered.)

For 18 years, RCS has relied on the H2B visa program for non-agricultural temporary workers. Visa holders from countries including Mexico, Costa Rica, Australia and Russia handle everything from building and running carnival rides to cooking and selling carnival food.

To get those visas, employers must satisfy the U.S. Department of Labor that the work can’t be filled by U.S. workers, and that foreign workers won’t have adverse effects on the wages and working conditions of their U.S.-born counterparts.

As required by those rules, Lopez pays to advertise carnival jobs in the U.S., and he keeps phone logs and certified receipts for email and letters that show he’s reached out to local communities and followed through with all work inquiries from U.S. citizens.

But the responses he gets from U.S. citizens aren’t enough, he says. Too many people shun nine months of work requiring heavy lifting, living in mobile homes and frequent travel.

Lopez is hardly alone. A 2013 study by the nonprofit ImmigrationWorks USA found that as more American-born workers attain higher levels of education, more foreign workers are needed to perform less-skilled labor.

There’s stiff competition for the 66,000 H2B visas available each year. (The visa is distinct from its H2A counterpart which is meant for seasonal agricultural work and has even stricter requirements for employers.) The last of the visas available for fiscal year 2017 were awarded this earlier this month, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Would-be workers face tough screening, Lopez said: “Anything as little as a jaywalking ticket could disqualify them.”

From fiscal year 2012 to 2015, Texas had the highest number of H2B jobs certified by the Department of Labor. The largest number of those was for landscaping.

Industries such as outdoor entertainment account for 10 percent of total H2B visas issued to U.S. employers each year.

I don’t have a specific point to make here. This sort of thing is invisible to most of us – be honest, you didn’t know this, right? If all these H2B visas were to disappear – which they won’t, since Dear Leader Trump makes heavy use of them to staff his golf courses – RCS and other firms that supply H2B laborers would find a solution. Maybe they’d pay American workers more, maybe they’d rely more on temps, maybe the businesses they support would scale back, maybe something else. One way or another, things would be different. I just thought it was worth pointing that out.

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