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Quick Hits
- The additional 64,716 H-2B visas reflect the maximum allocation permitted by the U.S. Congress.
- Employment data indicates a shortage of temporary workers across the United States in industries including tourism, housekeeping, landscaping, construction, amusement, and seafood processing.
- Allocating additional H-2B visas helps to ensure that temporary nonagricultural labor needs are met, supporting U.S. businesses.
DHS has indicated that the supplemental rule will allocate 20,000 visas to workers from Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, or Honduras. An additional 44,716 H-2B visas will be allocated for returning H-2B workers, defined as workers who were granted H-2B status in one of the past three fiscal years. The allocation for returning workers will be divided between the first and second halves of the fiscal year.
This announcement follows a call from a bipartisan group of U.S. senators earlier this month for the release of additional H-2B visas to ensure that the labor needs of businesses in their districts were met. In coordination with the DOL, DHS has allocated additional H-2B visas every year since FY 2017, with an exception for FY 2020, when COVID-19-related closures affected labor demands across the United States.
An initial 66,000 H-2B visas are available annually, split evenly between the first and second halves of the fiscal year. The cap for the first half of FY 2025 was met on September 18, 2024.
Through the H-2B guest worker program, employers are able to hire temporary nonagricultural foreign workers to meet their seasonal, intermittent, peak load, and one-time occurrence labor needs upon a demonstration that they are unable to find U.S. workers to fill their open positions. American employers regularly take advantage of the H-2B guest worker program to support their otherwise unmet temporary labor needs.
Ogletree Deakins’ Immigration Practice Group will continue to monitor developments and will publish updates on the Immigration blog as additional information becomes available.
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