WASHINGTON — With restaurants and resorts facing summer staff shortages, the Bush administration will announce federal regulations today to streamline the way foreign workers enter the country for seasonal jobs.
The Department of Labor is rewriting rules to help employers find and hire workers for temporary jobs as landscapers, waitresses and crab pickers more quickly and efficiently than current guidelines allow.
In one major change affecting industries such as construction and shipyards, the definition of "temporary" will be drastically expanded -- from the current 10 months to three years.
Adjusting the so-called H2B visa program is part of an ongoing administration effort to reconfigure immigration laws on a piecemeal basis in the absence of a comprehensive overhaul.
Last year, an attempt to remake the nation's immigration laws collapsed in Congress amid conservative anger over proposals to grant legal status to many illegal immigrants currently in the country.
A frustrated President Bush, who had favored the overhaul, responded with a 28-point plan to tighten enforcement at the border and in the workplace -- moves largely meant to placate conservative Republicans. That has led to more aggressive immigration raids and an even greater shortage of workers.
But in an effort to aid businesses, Bush also outlined plans to simplify existing visa programs for foreign farmworkers, highly skilled professionals and the short-term workers from all over the world who enter the country with H2B visas.
There are limits, however, to the administration's ability to change the seasonal visa program, especially in one crucial area: the number of visas available.
Employers consider the 66,000 new visas offered every year to be woefully inadequate, and efforts to expand the H2B visa program have been stymied in Congress. So federal officials hope that by smoothing out the procedures, some of the difficulties businesses are having in filling jobs with foreign workers will be eased.
Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said in an interview with The Times that the changes being announced today would cut down bureaucratic delays.
"Use of the program has increased in recent years, but duplicative requirements have . . . [meant] employers have failed to get workers in a timely fashion," Chao said.
And allowing shipyards and construction firms to bring workers in for three years, Chao said, would help those industries remain competitive in a global market.
