Washington is deporting immigrants and doubling guest-worker visas at the same time. The contradiction reveals who the labor market actually serves.
On New Year's Eve 2025, the departments of Homeland Security and Labor quietly announced that 35,000 supplemental H-2B visas would be available for the coming fiscal year -- roughly half the supplemental allocation issued in each of the prior three years. Landscaping companies, crab processors, and hotel operators braced for a lean season. Then, less than a month later, the administration reversed itself. The full allocation of 64,716 supplemental visas would proceed after all, effectively doubling the statutory cap of 66,000 and matching the Biden-era high-water mark.
The reversal was swift, but it was not mysterious. In the weeks between the two announcements, the Seasonal Employment Alliance -- an industry lobbying group representing employers who depend on temporary foreign labor -- held a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. Lodging at the president's resort sold out. So did the optional tee times at his golf course. Less than two weeks after the event was reported, the visas materialized.
What the H-2B program is
The H-2B visa allows American employers to hire foreign workers for temporary, non-agricultural jobs when, they attest, no willing domestic workers can be found. It is distinct from the better-known H-1B, which brings in workers for specialized, higher-skilled occupations on longer-term assignments that can lead to permanent residency; H-2B covers the opposite end of the labor market -- seasonal, lower-wage, and temporary by design. Congress set the annual cap at 66,000 in 1990 and has not raised it since, even as demand has exploded. In the first half of this fiscal year alone, the Department of Labor certified 94,534 worker positions -- nearly three times the half-year allotment of 33,000.
To close the gap, the DHS secretary has discretionary authority to release supplemental visas each year through a temporary rule, a mechanism that has become the program's de facto expansion valve.
The industries that rely on H-2B workers are among the most seasonal and labor-intensive in the economy. Landscaping accounts for nearly a third of all certifications. Hospitality and tourism follow, particularly in resort areas and on islands like Mackinac in Michigan, where roughly a quarter of the seasonal workforce holds an H-2B visa. Maryland's crab-picking houses, which employ about 500 guest workers annually -- mostly women from Mexico -- have told state officials they would simply not open without the program. The state estimates the loss at more than 1,000 jobs and $150 million in economic activity.
Workers enter tied to a single sponsoring employer. They cannot easily switch jobs, negotiate conditions, or complain about violations without risking deportation. The AFL-CIO has long argued that this "captive work" structure suppresses wages and working conditions not just for guest workers but for all domestic workers in the same industries.
The cost of cheap labor
Data from the Economic Policy Institute suggest the suppression is not theoretical. In the 15 occupations that use H-2B visas most heavily, certified wages run as much as 24.7 percent below national averages. In landscaping, employers save roughly $2.59 an hour by hiring H-2B workers over Americans; in forestry, the gap is $3.80. Across seven major H-2B industries, employers committed more than $2.2 billion in wage theft between 2000 and 2024.
The program's legal framework is supposed to prevent this. Before hiring foreign workers, employers must demonstrate to the Labor Department that no qualified Americans are "able, willing, and available" for the positions. In practice, the test is often perfunctory. Employers routinely satisfy the requirement by running ads in small-circulation newspapers for just two days -- the legal minimum -- then certify that no Americans applied. Resorts, country clubs, and landscaping firms across the country have posted hundreds of seasonal openings under these terms and hired almost no domestic workers. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as designed: the recruitment standard is low enough that clearing it requires more paperwork than effort.
The political contradiction
The administration has framed its immigration agenda in terms of stark national interest. Mass deportation operations have accelerated. ICE funding has reached $75 billion. Raids on restaurants and construction sites have become routine. The message is that foreign workers take American jobs and that enforcement will restore a labor market that prioritizes citizens.
The H-2B expansion says something different. It says that entire sectors of the economy -- the ones that mow lawns, clean hotel rooms, shuck oysters, and plant trees -- cannot function without imported labor paid below prevailing wages. And it says that the employers in those sectors have the political access to get what they need, even from an administration that has made restricting immigration its signature cause.
The contradiction is not lost on the president's own allies. The Immigration Accountability Project, an influential restrictionist group, called the expansion "not Americans First, it's Donors First," pointing out that many of the jobs in question still pay $11 or $12 an hour -- wages that have not kept pace with inflation. Breitbart, typically a reliable booster of the president's agenda, ran its coverage under the framing that "Trump deputies" had approved the visas, carefully distancing the president himself from the decision.
From the left, the critique takes a different shape but arrives at the same destination. Labor advocates argue that expanding a guest-worker program without reforming its structural defects -- the employer-tied visa, the weak recruitment standards, the absence of a path to permanent residency -- simply entrenches a two-tier labor system. Foreign workers are admitted on terms that make them pliable, while domestic workers are told the jobs they might take don't exist.
Who are the missing workers?
This is the question that hovers over the entire program. The H-2B visa rests on a legal fiction -- that for each certified position, no American worker is available. Yet America's labor force is full of people who have been told, in various ways, that the economy has no place for them.
The American Enterprise Institute has documented what it calls "warning lights flashing" on workforce participation among older Americans. At pre-pandemic labor-force participation rates, the country would have roughly two million more workers. Many who left the labor force during COVID never returned. They are not, by any formal measure, "unemployed." They have been reclassified, by statistical convention and sometimes by their own weary resignation, as "retired" -- whether they wished to be or not.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to show that older job seekers face longer searches and steeper wage cuts upon reemployment than their younger counterparts. Callback rates are uniformly lower for older applicants. In seasonal and physically demanding industries -- precisely the sectors where H-2B workers concentrate -- age stereotypes compound the difficulty. Employers who claim they cannot find Americans have, in many cases, not looked very hard for the ones who are already here.
This is not an argument against immigration. It is an argument against a program that has been allowed to grow, through annual administrative workarounds, into a permanent feature of the economy without the accountability that permanence demands. The statutory cap has not moved in more than three decades. Yet the effective cap has nearly doubled, from roughly 81,000 total visas in 2017 to more than 130,000 this year. The supplemental allocation, renewed each fiscal year at the discretion of whoever sits in the DHS secretary's chair, has become a quiet subsidy for industries that prefer cheap, controllable labor to the inconvenience of competing for workers in an open market.
The 2026 World Cup has given the expansion additional political cover. Hotels, restaurants, and event venues will need surge staffing. Business groups have argued that labor shortages could hamper preparations for the tournament, and the administration has been receptive. But the underlying dynamic predates any single event. The H-2B program grows because the employers who benefit from it are organized, well-funded, and willing to host fundraisers at the right address. The workers who might be displaced by it -- domestic and foreign alike -- are not.
Tim Hygh, executive director of the Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau, captured the employers' position with unusual candor. He welcomed the visa release but noted that it came just three months before seasonal workers are scheduled to arrive, leaving what he called "a very tight window to finalize logistics." What he and other employers want is not an annual act of administrative grace but a permanent expansion -- a higher cap, set by Congress, that they can plan around.
That may yet come. Legislation to raise the H-2B ceiling has been introduced repeatedly, with bipartisan support from members whose districts depend on seasonal industries. Whether a Congress that can agree on little else can agree on guest workers remains to be seen. In the meantime, the annual ritual continues: employers lobby, the administration deliberates, and a supplemental allocation appears -- always temporary, always renewed, always just enough to keep the question of who the American labor market is really designed to serve from being answered too clearly.