Tips for Applicants to Temporary Guest Worker Programs

To hire workers every year, you must go through the same steps. This process becomes considerably easier if you employ the same workers each year. Once the workers have been through the guest worker system and understand the regulations, they can help ease the process by recruiting other workers, ensuring that their eligibility is in order, and helping with transportation of other workers from their homes to the United States and the job sites.

Make sure that the workers are treated with respect and that they enjoy working for your company. Help them set up bank accounts to avoid the heavy fees of commercial money transfer services. Assist them with obtaining Social Security numbers and drivers licenses and with filing for tax returns. Provide them with all of the training that they need to do the job.

These workers are here to work to improve the lives of their families back home. Take an interest in them and help them reach those aspirations. They are then likely to return to your company for years.

H-2A employers are required to provide housing and transportation for the workers, but H-2B employers have no housing or transportation requirements. Lodging and meals are the largest expenses for H-2B workers, and the stories of ten to fifteen workers cramming into one hotel room for months at a time are boundless. To have effective, dedicated workers, employees must provide affordable, culturally appropriate housing. If you cannot provide housing, ensure that each of your employees has sufficient space and facilities in hotel rooms, trailers, apartments, or rental housing. A small subsidy of housing costs on your part will make for much better workers over the long term. Make sure there are sufficient facilities for cooking their meals. These workers are living and working in a strange society and being able to prepare food that they are familiar with is very important to their adjustment to working in the United States.

In many ways, guest workers become dependent on the company they work for. They are thousands of miles from home with limited or no English skills, and they do not have family nearby for support. They depend on the company for help with housing, transportation, and medical care as well as for small things such as finding Laundromats, making trips to the grocery store, and dealing with bank accounts. Arrange a time during the week when workers can express concerns, opinions, and explain problems they are encountering. In many ways, the company becomes their family while they are in the United States, and if they feel they can come to you with legal matters, health care questions, tax issues, and other concerns, they will be more dedicated to their jobs.

Get your existing U.S. workers excited about the new workers. Explain the program to them, and talk about the changes it means for the company. Work on bilingual education, and provide materials for basic communication. Look for any opportunity to enhance relations between U.S. workers and guest workers, and avoid segregation of tasks in the workplace.

Workers living outside of the United States must apply for a visa with their local American consulate. To apply, the worker must file a Form DS-156 application. The applicant must also pay a non-refundable fee of $100 and present a valid passport and notice of approval of the employer's petition from the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The applicant may also be required to show proof of binding ties to a non-U.S. residence that they do not intend to abandon. Note: A visa does not guarantee admission to the United States. BCIS can refuse to let a worker enter at the port of entry or may alter the length of stay.

According to the BCIS, employers of temporary noncitizen workers must examine the documents presented by the workers. If the documents reasonably appear to be genuine and to relate to the person presenting them, the employer must accept them. To do otherwise could be an unfair immigration-related employment practice. If a document does not reasonably appear on its face to be genuine and to relate to the person presenting it, the employer must not accept it. Also, employers may not accept photocopies of documents, with the only exception being a certified copy of a birth certificate.

Charges from professional recruitment agencies vary up to $400. However, the countries from which workers are coming limit the amount that recruiters can charge. For example, in Guatemala charges are $30 to $70 per worker and in Mexico $100 per worker. The professional recruiting agencies assist with the application process and find the workers to accept the visa. If you decide to go with an agency, do your research on the company, and check with other contractors who have used them.

Many companies dedicate a person to the application and recruitment process and find that it has benefits. The workers respect the companies that actually travel to their home countries and interview them in person. While this may not be possible for every company, it is recommended.

• All initial applications to the H-2 program begin
  at the State Workforce Agency. Contact informa-
  tion for the SWA for Alabama is as follows:

  Alabama Department of Industrial Relations
  649 Monroe Street, Room 2805
  Montgomery, AL 36131
  Phone: (334) 242-8020
  Fax: (334) 242-8585
  http://dir.alabama.gov/

• Contact the regional office for the U.S.
  Department of Labor at (404) 562-2131 or consult
  the U.S. Department of Labor Web page regard-
  ing the H-2B program at http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/h-2a.cfm.

• Contact the Atlanta District of the Bureau of
  Citizenship and Immigration Services at the
  following:

  Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services
  Atlanta District
  Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Building
  77 Forsyth Street SW
  Atlanta, GA 30303
  (800) 375-5283
  http://www.immigration.gov/graphics/