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WORK VISAS
Work visa changes and the threat to trainers
Unannounced changes in the standards used to issue work visas for foreigners and a premature increase in the minimum wage for those foreigners who were approved to work in the United States have wreaked havoc on Thoroughbred trainers, many of whom have relied on foreign help for years.
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WORDS: BILL HELLER PHOTOS: HORSEPHOTOS.COM/SHUTTERSTOCK
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t’s kind of a two-headed monster,” Rick Violette, president of both the National Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association and the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association (NYTHA), said October 4th. Whether or not there has been a formal change in policy by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Labor is difficult to determine. Its effects are not. “This isn’t about illegal immigration,” Violette said. “These are legitimate people looking for decent wages and they’re being discouraged from coming here. If that happens, then American jobs will be lost. Farms can’t stay open if Americans don’t fill the jobs and they don’t have access to the other avenue. Those places will close.” To prevent that from happening, six trainers – Shug McGaughey, Kiaran McLaughlin, John Kimmel, Mike Hushion, Bill Mott, and Bruce Brown – filed a lawsuit against the Department of Labor and the USCIS seeking a Temporary Restraining Order to stop what Violette terms “the arbitrary denials” of H-2B visas for foreign workers. In prior years, H-2B visas were routinely approved for legitimate employers, including trainers, who filed the extensive paperwork and followed the rules. The United States set an annual cap of 66,000 H-2B visas in 1990. In 2005, the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act gave an exemption to foreign workers who had previously been issued those visas. That allowed some 250,000
visas to be issued in 2007, but the cap reverted to 66,000 when Congress did not extend the exemption. The impact on horse racing was immediate. “Good, hard-working people who are trying to dutifully follow the law to obtain visas are being denied, while people who are overstaying their visas are being rewarded with jobs,” Will Velie, an Oklahoma attorney who was president of Horsemen Labor Solutions, said in a June 6th, 2008, story in the Philadelphia Daily News. “The horse racing industry faces more than a chronic and urgent need for workers. I would say it is on the verge of collapse.”
“These are legitimate people looking for decent wages and they’re being discouraged from coming here. Farms can’t stay open if Americans don’t fill the jobs and they don’t have access to the other avenue. Those places will close” Rick Violette
A separate lawsuit was filed by NYTHA, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, the National Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association (HBPA) and others to delay an increase in minimum wage for foreign workers which was supposed to be implemented on January 1st, 2012. With little or no notice, the Department of Labor announced that the new wages would go into effect on October 1st, 2011. This lawsuit succeeded in obtaining a Temporary Restraining Order, delaying the implementation of the new wage requirements from October 1st to November 30th. This issue will be revisited. The raise in the minimum wage for foreign workers came from U.S. District Judge Louis Pollak in Pennsylvania. In a ruling in 2010, he said current wages provided by the H-2B visa program were low, and that the program could be exploited by employers who want to replace American workers with low-paid foreigners. The Department of Labor subsequently agreed to an average increase of $4.38 an hour for H2B workers. The rate varied by occupation, be it dishwashers, janitors, landscapers, roofers, or grooms. Thoroughbred racing is only one of the industries adversely affected by these policy changes. Claiming that the wage changes could cost the state of Maryland as many as 1,000 jobs in its seafood industry, U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is seeking a permanent resolution. The October 1st wage increase would have coincided with the middle of the seafood season. “We got a pause, but I’m going to keep fighting for a long-term situation that is
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