For those of you who have seen the Bill Murray classic movie, “Groundhog Day,” the H-2B saga seems reminiscent. As part of the deal to end the partial shutdown of the federal government, H-2B advocates in Washington secured language in the bipartisan compromise appropriations bill to allow the secretary of homeland security, in consultation with the secretary of labor, to... read more
Rolling the H-2B stone up the Hill again After a 35-day partial government shutdown, Congress passed a temporary three-week spending bill without — you guessed it — H-2B reform language. It was a long shot that H-2B would be included in the temporary spending bill, but advocates for the program, including AmericanHort and the National Association of Landscape Professionals put... read more
A tentative agreement to double the number of H-2B visas and implement other reforms to the guest worker program did not move forward in December, as hoped, with critical federal budget bills. The package of H-2B reforms was slated to be included with a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has been without a fiscal year... read more
Last Friday, Dec. 7, funding for several federal agencies was due to run out unless Congress passed a set of appropriations bills, which we hoped would contain reforms to the H-2B guest worker program. Congress defers action Unfortunately, the death of former President George H. W. Bush and his state funeral last week brought official activity in Washington to a... read more
With the Nov. 6 midterm elections just days away, what can we expect come Jan. 1 in the new Congress? The consensus of the pollsters and pundits is the U.S. House of Representatives will flip from Republican control to Democratic. At this writing several days out from the midterms, the political website fivethirtyeight.com puts the probability that this flip will... read more
The H-2B returning-worker provision and some modest H-2B reforms did not make it into the fiscal year 2019 federal appropriations bills, as business advocates had hoped. Appropriations bills, except DHS The House and Senate sent several appropriations bills to President Trump’s desk for signature, encompassing most of the federal bureaucracy. However, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) appropriation, in which... read more
