PROVINCETOWN — The seasonal economy of the Outer Cape relies heavily on a workforce that many tourists seldom see: the chefs, dishwashers, and housekeepers who keep hotels looking pristine and restaurants running smoothly.
Many who do these jobs are Jamaicans who come to the Outer Cape through a seasonal worker program that dates to 1952: the H-2 non-immigrant visa, which was divided into the H-2A for agricultural workers and the H-2B for nonagricultural workers in 1986. Businesses apply for H-2B employees in a lengthy process that includes a lottery every Jan. 4 — a game of chance that can result in key employees arriving in late March one year and early June the next.
This already fraught process became even more anxiety-producing this year when the Dept. of Homeland Security, at a key juncture in early March, went completely silent for three weeks, according to Outer Cape employers and the owners of two companies who help businesses with their visa applications.
“There was already a lot of uncertainty this year — sort of like the pandemic year, except this chaos is all self-inflicted,” said Mac Hay, who operates five Mac’s restaurants and four fish markets on the Outer and Lower Cape.
For a “nerve-wracking” three weeks in March, said Hay, “we weren’t hearing anything. People in Rep. Keating’s office were getting zero communication. There was nothing, period, coming from the government.”
Keith Pabian, who owns a law firm in Framingham that specializes in H-2B visas, said that “it was only a three-week period, but at the time it felt much longer. No one understood, and everyone was panicking.”
In recent years, Congress has specifically authorized the Dept. of Homeland Security to release tens of thousands of extra visas when the year’s allocation of 66,000 H-2B visas has been reached, Pabian said. On March 5, when the cap was reached, the department simply didn’t announce that it had happened — meaning the next steps of accepting “cap relief” applications and issuing supplemental visas also couldn’t happen, Pabian said.
The rules for the supplemental visas had been published on Dec. 2, Pabian pointed out. That the visas would exist had not been in doubt — but by withholding the announcement, the government “created this feeling that they could take it away,” which ignited “deep-seated fears that businesses wouldn’t get workers,” he said.
Mark Carchidi, whose Yarmouth Port company Antioch Associates USA II also specializes in H-2B visa applications, said that timing is crucial when it comes to seasonal workers.
Businesses that drew an “A” in the lottery were already seeing approvals take longer in January, Carchidi said. Delays compound like bad traffic behind a car accident on a highway, he said, and employers at the back of the line wind up having to get through the summer without key employees.
“Employers tell me they’ll have to shut down a wing of their restaurant, or take blocks of rooms offline,” Carchidi said. “You can’t send food out on dirty plates, and you can take all the reservations you want, but you can’t rent dirty rooms.”
Leave and Return
Outer Cape towns are heavily reliant on the H-2B program, Hay said, because there simply aren’t enough year-round people left to run the tourist economy.
“How many year-round people are in Wellfleet now and not retired?” he said. “It takes 75 to 100 people to run a restaurant, and you’re not going to get all those people from Wellfleet.”
Collectively, businesses in the eight towns of the Outer and Lower Cape applied for 1,920 H-2B employees for the summer of 2024 and were approved for 1,742 — which is 30 percent of all the H-2B employees approved for the entire state that year, according to Dept. of Labor data.
The process is lengthy and expensive, said both Hay and Patrick Patrick, owner of Marine Specialties in Provincetown. All jobs filled by H-2B workers have to be extensively advertised, wages must at least match federal “prevailing wage” tables, and employers often pay for flights and broker housing.
Nonetheless, it’s worth it, Patrick said. Most of the people who get H-2B visas to work at Marine Specialties have been doing so for years. Many were hired by his mother, who died in 2022.
“One person has been coming to work here for 25 years, since we first started with H-2B,” said Patrick. “It was October when my mom died, our H-2B employees were still in town, and they all came to the Methodist Church and sang at her funeral.”
Guillermo Yingling, part owner of the Provincetown restaurant Local 186 whose family also owns Bubala’s by the Bay and Spiritus Pizza, said that people have returned to work at those restaurants for decades.
“There are people who have retired now, and their kids come work for us,” said Yingling. “The granddaughter of one of our very first H-2B employees came to work here. Our family has spent winters in Jamaica since before I was born — many of these are lifelong relationships.”
Hay said that he started applying for H-2B employees in 2001, about five years after his first restaurant opened. Money earned in America has helped his employees build houses and start their own businesses in Jamaica, he said.
“There’s this perspective that everyone wants to come here, but what I’ve found is most people want to come to the United States, have opportunity, better their lives, and go back home,” Hay said. Just under a quarter of his staff are H-2B workers, and 80 to 90 percent of them come back year after year, he said.
A Vulnerability
On March 26, the Dept. of Homeland Security announced that the nationwide cap had been reached on March 5 and that 24,000 supplemental visas would be released under the Dec. 2 rules. Many Outer Cape employers heaved a sigh of relief.
The commitment of many Cape Cod business owners to bringing back the same people every year is actually a vulnerability, both Pabian and Carchidi said.
In recent years, most of the supplemental visas have been reserved for “returning workers” who have held H-2B visas before — which has been very helpful to Outer Cape employers who pull a B, C, D, or E in the visa lottery but mostly rely on returning workers, Pabian said.
That “returning worker” allocation is at the discretion of the Dept. of Homeland Security, he said, and there’s no way to know if the agency will continue it next year.
Pabian and Carchidi said that H-2B visa holders can instead stay “in country” and string together summer and winter jobs with different U.S. employers for up to three years. Workers who do that can receive H-2B visa extensions that aren’t limited by the nationwide numeric cap on the program.
Ironically, this means that people who stay here for up to three years under non-immigrant and temporary status are more likely to get their visas renewed than those who go home to their countries each winter and seek new visas in the spring.
“People who leave the country to go home, there’s a risk that you can’t get them back,” said Carchidi. “It is ironic — but if you rely on supplemental visas to get your people from out of country, it’s very risky.”
