YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — From Ukraine to Ecuador, scores of young maids and dishwashers are having trouble getting U.S. visas this spring -- and that means trouble in Yosemite Valley.
"I've been making beds and scrubbing showers," said Tracy Rogge, vice president of operations for park concessionaire Delaware North Cos. The chief operating officer "cleaned toilets and bagged groceries. Our director of finance was making burgers. This really caught us off-guard."
Laura Chastain, recruiting manager for Delaware North, estimates that she is 300 employees short. "I don't sleep at night right now," she said.
Concession managers in Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks bring in hundreds of foreign workers annually from Eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Southern Africa because, they say, they cannot recruit American youths to fill the dirtiest jobs in the park's kitchens and hotels.
At Yosemite, those foreign workers make up more than 20% of the summer workforce and about half the park's housekeeping staff. At Yellowstone, they constitute one-third of a 2,600-worker summer crew. At the Grand Canyon, the ratio is about one foreign worker for every three domestic ones.
This shift in makeup has attracted little notice, perhaps because so many recruits land in "back-of-the-house" jobs. But this spring -- as President Bush and Congress began to wrestle again over immigration policy -- scores of would-be Yosemite workers hit a snag in their visa paperwork. That left park managers facing a staffing shortfall and has raised a pair of awkward questions.
Can these national parks can get along any more without international workers? And will Yosemite have its act together in time for the summer rush that begins this weekend?
"What we have found is that American kids, up to their mid-20s ... don't want to wash pots and clean kitchens and cut onions and be rooms-keepers making beds," said Joe Levesque, Delaware North's vice president for human resources. "So we have had to turn to these international workers."
Delaware North grossed more than $110 million last year as the principal concessionaire at Yosemite -- the richest single contract in the national park system. Xanterra Parks and Resorts handles commercial operations at several national parks, including Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.
Both companies said that they started bringing in foreign workers about seven years ago and that their dependence on them had grown even as attendance at national parks fell slightly.
