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J-1 visa

    HOUSING SOLUTIONS

    A Priest’s Home in Provincetown May House Summer Workers

    St. Mary of the Harbor steps up to address a crisis

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Amid a massive workforce housing crisis that threatens the survival of local businesses, one idea appears to be Heaven sent.

    The members of the vestry of St. Mary of the Harbor, the Episcopal church at 517 Commercial St., are working out final details with restaurant owners Joachim Sandbichler and Mark Ferrari to house six to eight of their summer J-1 student visa workers in the church’s vacant rectory.

    “We feel very excited about it,” Sandbichler said on May 8. “But it is only a tiny part of the solution.”

    The rectory, an elegant 1880 three-bedroom, two-bathroom home on the waterfront next to the church, is normally reserved for the resident priest, said Mary-Jo Avellar, a member of the church deanery. But when Pastor Terry Pannell retired recently, the vestry found the Rev. Bill Rich, formerly of Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston, to take Pannell’s position. Rich already had a home in Truro and did not need the waterfront digs, Avellar said.

    Arlene Weston spent the winter scouting real estate for restaurant staff when she found the St. Mary of the Harbor rectory. The vestry and restaurant owners are planning to rent the waterfront home for J-1 student visa workers. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    Meanwhile, Arlene Weston, whom Sandbichler and Ferrari hired to scout summer housing for their employees, had been picking through the meager offerings for seasonal workers in a town where the median sales price so far this year is nearly $2 million for a single-family home and $849,000 for a condominium, according to the Cape Cod & Islands Association of Realtors. That is 31 and 41 percent, respectively, over the median sales prices one year ago.

    More than 53 percent of the properties Cape-wide that closed in March went for above the asking price, the association reports.

    Sandbichler and Ferarri own two restaurants, the Patio American Grill & Cocktail Bar and Pepe’s Wharf, and are about to open a third, Freemans, at 333 Commercial St. in the former Café Edwige. They need housing for about 100 employees and have secured enough for 40 of them through “gumshoe work,” Sandbichler said.

    This year, the restaurant owners knew the housing problem would be worse than ever. That is why they employed Weston, not just as the general manager of Freemans but also as a real estate scout beginning in February. She has been hunting for “B-minus” real estate that could be used for seasonal housing ever since, Sandbichler said.

    “I read ads fast and get to people right away,” Weston said. “I think housing is possible if you start early enough and have the money to secure it.”

    How bad is it this year? Weston’s housing search this winter included two potential scams. In one case, she nearly fell for a rental offer until she went in person and saw the unit fully occupied. Another time, online scammers offered her a three-bedroom in Truro for $10,000. “Just send me the money and you can see it tomorrow,” she was told. “Do you think I screwed my head on this morning,” she replied.

    Sandbichler said rooms usually renting for $4,000 for the season are now $12,000. He has toured places so vile he wishes he could forget them. Like many business owners, he and Ferarri already own apartments for staff. They rent out parts of their restaurant buildings for employees to live in and subsidize the rent other workers must pay.

    The rectory of St. Mary of the Harbor is on the left. (Photo by K.C. Myers)

    “We started getting into the housing business years ago when we saw how the J-1 students had to live,” he said. “Shame on us that our workers have to live in these conditions.”

    He and Ferrari redo floors, paint, rip up old carpeting, and generally try to make the places habitable. But what is on the market this year takes more than elbow grease. It is also incredibly overpriced.

    In the middle of this struggle, a SeasCape Realty agent Weston was working with told her the St. Mary’s vestry might be available.

    “I said, ‘Are you serious? The house is beautiful,’ ” Weston said.

    St. Mary’s new pastor did not return calls from the Independent. Mike Sutila, treasurer of the church vestry, said of the agreement, “We thought, what a perfect fit. We are really excited about it.”

    The J-1 visa students are expected to move in this Sunday, May 15, Sutila said.

    “It worked out very well for us,” Weston said. “To get a house with a massive living room right on the water. You cannot beat it.”

    No one would discuss the exact terms. The church is charging rent that “is not a steal and not overly expensive,” Sandbichler said. “We are very grateful to them.”

    Still, he added, the cost of real estate remains a huge problem and does not bode well for the sustainability of local businesses and the town generally. “If all the businesses become condominiums,” he said, “there will be nothing else and then why would people come here?”

    THE SEASON

    The Missing Summer Workforce, by the Numbers

    How Trump’s ‘travel ban’ is reverberating through the local economy

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Every spring, the Outer Cape’s population, and payrolls, swell, as about 5,000 people pick up seasonal jobs here, according to Cape Cod Commission data. Some of those 5,000 live here year-round and pick up their summer work in March or April. Others arrive from places like New York, Boston, or Florida around May 15 — the traditional start date for the increasingly rare summer rental.

    About a quarter of those 5,000 workers normally arrive from overseas, through a pair of “non-immigrant visa programs” called J-1 and H-2B. The J-1 Summer Work-Travel program brings about 700 college students to the four Outer Cape towns in a normal year, mostly from Bulgaria but also from other East European countries. The H-2B program brings another 700 or so adult workers, mostly from Jamaica.

    But this is not a normal year.

    For the three-quarters of the workforce who are American, the greatest challenge by far is finding a decent place to sleep at night, as the stock of year-round and seasonal rentals has been eroded by the growth of the short-term rental market.

    For the quarter who come from overseas, the greatest challenge this year is getting a U.S. embassy to process a visa. President Trump’s “visa ban,” initiated by executive order on June 22 and extended on Dec. 31 of last year, then left by the Biden administration to expire this March 31, has effectively killed the J-1 program in many countries this year, and severely limited it in others.

    The J-1 short-circuit and lack of affordable housing are combining to bring the local economy to what state Sen. Julian Cyr and Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce CEO Wendy Northcross are both calling a crisis point.

    The H-2B program is in better shape, partly because certain U.S. embassies and consulates continued to issue thousands of H-2Bs visas even while the ban was in effect. This appears to have been due to a loophole that allowed H-2B workers providing “labor or services essential to the United States food supply chain” to receive visas.

    In the six weeks since the ban expired, the J-1 program has come back to life, but slowly. At U.S. embassies overseas, where Covid protocols have limited the number of staff allowed at work, the thousands of visa interviews that would otherwise have been underway since early spring now currently number in the tens or low hundreds, depending on the location.

    The State Dept. will not answer questions about visa production overseas, and individual embassies refer questions back to Washington, D.C. But posted State Dept. records and conversations with visa operators help paint a picture of how visa production is really going now.

    “The 26th of April was the first day of J-1 visa interviews in the embassy,” said Antoni Slavimirov, co-owner of the Agency for International Mobility in Sofia, Bulgaria, which recruits college students into the J-1 program. “They were doing five interviews per day,” he said. “Now they are doing 10 per day.” That makes 50 visa interviews in a week, in an embassy that used to do many hundreds per week.

    In 2019, Bulgaria sent almost 5,000 J-1 students to the U.S., according to State Dept. records. At the current pace, that number might not reach 500. The rest of Bulgaria reopened at the end of April, Slavimirov said, making the point that it’s not the country but the U.S. embassy that’s the bottleneck.

    This problem is not limited to Bulgaria. Turkey sent 11,000 J-1 students to the U.S. in 2019, but the U.S. embassy there announced it won’t be scheduling any J-1 interviews this year. The U.S. embassy in Russia usually sends 7,000 student workers to the U.S., but they’re embroiled in a diplomatic dispute with Putin’s government, and won’t be doing any J-1 interviews now.

    There are embassies in the region that appear to be more active, including those in Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. According to the State Dept.’s J-1 visa map, there are now about 250 students currently pursuing visas for work in the four outermost towns of Cape Cod. That’s less than half the normal number, but it still means the sounds of Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian might be heard here by summer.

    When it comes to the H-2B program, the Outer Cape may stand a better chance of getting its normal number of workers this year. That’s because the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica has been aided by two forces — the “national interest exception” that exempted food supply chain workers from the visa ban, and rules that allow many returning workers to have their interview requirements waived.

    State Dept. records show that the embassy in Kingston issued 2,700 H-2B visas between October and March, in spite of the ban — about half its normal rate.

    One twist in the story of the slowdown is that local employers actually asked for slightly fewer H-2Bs this year than in prior years. Normally, employers in the four Outer Cape towns apply for — and are certified for — about 700 positions in a season, principally housekeepers and cooks.  This year there were only 562 certified H-2B jobs in the four towns.

    The process employers go through is complex and uncertain. First, certification involves proving to the Dept. of Labor that positions were properly advertised to Americans, with a published wage rate based on prevailing wages, and could not be filled. H-2B workers must be paid the prevailing rates that were advertised. The average starting hourly wage in the 37 applications from Provincetown this year was $15.32.

    Even if all the employers’ applications are certified, it’s still hard to know how many H-2B workers will arrive. After certification, the applications for workers are then run through a nationwide lottery system until a summertime cap of 33,000 workers is reached. In most recent years, that cap has been altered or lifted; this year it was raised by a further 22,000. The date of the second lottery for those 22,000 visa spots has not been announced yet.

    The uncertainty of a lottery system is an aggravation for employers and workers alike, and Cape Cod’s U.S. Rep. Bill Keating wants the lottery scrapped entirely.

    Unlike J-1 students, who are no longer eligible for the program once they’ve graduated from college, many H-2B workers have been traveling from Jamaica to the Outer Cape and back for years or even decades.

    Yet there are plenty of Outer Cape employers who still don’t know if they’ll get their H-2B workers.

    In the meantime, an optimistic tally of 500 H-2Bs and 250 J-1s would mean about 700 workers fewer than those normally here for the season.

    ECONOMY

    There Will Be International Workers, but Not as Many

    Arriving from countries with fewer infections, seasonal workforce takes a risk to serve here

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The Outer Cape is not a highly diverse place. When it comes to sexual orientation, Provincetown has a higher concentration of LGBTQ people than almost anywhere — but beyond that, racial, religious, and national-origin diversity is low. The primary engines that bring diversity to the Outer Cape are two visa programs that allow non-Americans to work here seasonally.

    The J-1 Summer Work Travel program is designed as a cultural exchange, and in a normal year it brings about 700 international college students to the four Outer Cape towns, most of them from Bulgaria, according to U.S. State Dept. figures. The H-2B is a labor program that lets employers apply to fill specific seasonal positions with overseas workers, and for decades now, hundreds of Jamaicans have traveled from their island to the Cape to work here in the summer and fall.

    Although in both countries the number of Covid-19 cases has been far lower than in the U.S., the virus crisis has disrupted the two programs differently. The result is that there will be very few college students from Eastern Europe this year, but there will be people coming from Jamaica to work here under the H-2B program.

    A Perfect Storm for J-1

    The Bulgarian flag adorns a house in Provincetown. (Photo Paul Benson)

    The Summer Work Travel program is built around the academic calendar, and the coronavirus outbreak was perfectly timed to disrupt it. In 2019, almost 90 percent of the J-1 visas originating in the U.S. embassy in Bulgaria were issued in March, April, and May, according to State Dept. records. Participants mostly arrive in May and June, and they’re obligated to be done working by the last week of September. (Participants are allowed one month after their last workday to travel in the U.S.)

    This tight schedule was blown apart by the pandemic. The State Dept. suspended routine visa services worldwide on March 20. A fair number of J-1 visas had already been issued by that date, the records show — almost a quarter of Bulgaria’s number for the prior year. But even for those students with visas in hand, there are reasons not to come.

    Travel from Bulgaria to America is not restricted, but it is made difficult by a maze of new border controls imposed after the outbreak. Most of the normal transit points are in the “Schengen zone” (named after a 1985 treaty signed in Schengen, Luxembourg, which eased trade and established common visas among 26 European countries, though not yet including Bulgaria), which is now subject to travel restrictions. Some of Bulgaria’s own borders are closed, including the one with Turkey. The easiest path from Bulgaria to Boston right now runs through Belgrade, Serbia.

    “I know some students who took the bus from Sofia to Belgrade, and then the direct flight to New York, and then to Boston,” said Antoni Slavimirov, co-owner of the Agency for International Mobility, which recruits students into the J-1 program. “Ninety percent of the students are deciding not to go. It’s too late, there’s not much time to work, and it’s very expensive to fly.

    “The students who do go, it will not be the first-year students,” added Slavimirov.  “It will be the ones that have come before, who know they have a good job.”

    H2s Are Essential

    The White House made several loud announcements about restricting immigration and travel during the pandemic. Tucked away in a quiet part of the State Dept.’s website, however, are these words from March 26: “The H-2 program is essential to the economy and food security of the United States and is a national security priority. Therefore, we intend to continue processing H-2 cases as much as possible.”

    That corner of the government’s website went on to state that consular officers “can, if they so choose, now waive the visa interview requirement for first-time and returning H-2 applicants … We anticipate the vast majority of otherwise qualified H-2 applicants will now be adjudicated without an interview.”

    Thus, in reality, H-2 arrangements were actually being encouraged at the federal level, rather than restricted, as the current president advertised. Technically, H-2B visas were suspended for five days between March 20 and 26. At that point, it was up to each embassy to decide how to proceed.

    The U.S. embassy in Jamaica announced that it would begin using the expanded interview waiver rules on May 18. Indiana Hutchison-Willis, owner of Faith Placement Services, a visa facilitation agency in Jamaica, confirmed that the embassy has actually been releasing H-2B visas since then.

    There would have been 300 to 500 people traveling to the Outer Cape on H-2Bs in 2020 had the pandemic not happened. Businesses in the Outer Cape towns submitted applications for 509 employees, though not all of those applications would have made it through the employer lotteries.

    It’s hard to say exactly how many will travel here in this strange year. It’s clear, however, that the path here from Jamaica is much more open than the path from Bulgaria. Flights from Jamaica to America have also been easier to come by. A Kingston to Miami to Boston flight can be had for under $400.

    Bulgaria and Jamaica are experiencing dramatically fewer Covid-19 deaths than the U.S. Source: European CDC, Situation Update Worldwide, updated on June 15.

    The problem may come down to fear — not of visa and travel logistics, but of the health hazard a job in the U.S. represents for those arriving from less-infected countries. Jamaica has had 617 cases of coronavirus total, and 10 deaths, in a population of three million. Massachusetts has had 105,000 cases, and 7,538 deaths, in a population of almost seven million.

    Put another way, Jamaica has experienced 21 cases per 100,000 people, and Massachusetts has experienced 1,533 cases per 100,000 people.  That means Massachusetts has 73 times the case density that Jamaica has. People from Jamaica put themselves in danger when they come to work here. Statistically, we are the bearers of illness, not our guests.

    From the employers’ point of view, at least the timing of the pandemic has been much kinder to the H-2B program than it was to J-1. The U.S. embassy in Jamaica normally releases half the season’s allotment in May, June, and July, according to State Dept. records. People who travel on H-2B are allowed to stay for six months or more, and can continue working through September, October, and November.

    If Jamaicans do risk coming, they can stay for months in which many local business owners are placing great hope this year.

    ECONOMY

    Small Businesses Seeking to Reopen Face Obstacles

    Problems remain with health rules, staffing, and government assistance

    By

    Arcadia
    Small business owner Jay Gurewitsch.

    PROVINCETOWN — Bringing a business back from a dead standstill is hard enough. But the problems surrounding that effort during the Covid epidemic are so fiendishly interwoven, they resemble the work of a novelist, not a virus.

    Businesses that seek to reopen face entirely new rules of operation, a timeline no one knows yet, and the possibility they might be closed again at a moment’s notice. Their customers may not be free to come here; if they are here, they may have no money; if they have money, they may be too afraid to spend it.

    If you got a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan from the Small Business Administration, “forgiveness” is uncertain. The SBA’s disaster loan program seems to have fallen off the Earth. New unemployment benefits could make it harder to hire staff. If employees are coming from overseas, their visas may be canceled. Even with a visa, they may still be unable to fly here. It would make an impressive Gordian knot if so many businesses weren’t trapped inside it.

    Missing Disaster Loans

    The SBA’s disaster loans were supposed to offer immediate relief, designed to keep cash flowing and accounts current. Instead, the program seems to have collapsed into an administrative black hole from which not even information can escape. The SBA has confirmed almost nothing about the program, and the formula for determining the loan amount is a mystery.

    Jeannine Marshall, president of Coastal Community Capital, was on a mid-March webinar with a disaster loan administrator who outlined how the loan amounts were supposed to work. “He described it then as: you take your gross annual revenue and subtract the cost of goods you had to buy,” she said. “Roughly speaking, everything that’s not your cost of goods is your operating expenses. Divide that number by two, and you have six months of operating expenses. That’s the formula for the loan — or at least it was.”

    Such loans could actually help keep a business solvent. The disaster loan program has had an additional $50 billion allocated to it — and because that allocation actually pays for the losses on the loans, it should, by Congressional rules, support seven times the amount of actual lending. The SBA is still staggering under the weight of 4 million disaster loan applications, but at some point, that money should start appearing.

    Payroll Confusion

    endless knots
    A display of mathematical endless knots. (Photo Matemateca IME/USP Rodrigo Tetsuo Artenton)

    The money that has appeared — PPP loans — may present other tangles. These loans are designed to pay for two months’ worth of payroll, at which point they convert into a forgiven loan, never to be repaid. This is a godsend for businesses that never stopped operating (such as this newspaper). For the businesses that have no payroll now because they laid off staff or hadn’t opened yet, it can be a surprise to learn that their payroll must start while they’re closed for the loan to be forgiven.

    Just around the corner is another problem: when it’s time to call employees back, many, especially those who rely on tips, will realize that super-enhanced unemployment pays more than working a venue with few customers. A conflict between employers who need loan forgiveness and employees reluctant to return could arise — and the real health risks of reopening complicate matters further.

    There are two possible solutions to this logjam.

    Employees can work part-time and still receive unemployment benefits. As long as an employee earns up to $1 less than her weekly benefit amount, that employee will still receive the balance of her weekly benefit and the whole extra $600 a week that Congress allocated in the CARES Act, said Monica Halas of Greater Boston Legal Services. The extra $600 a week continues through July 25, and for some businesses, reduced consumer demand and reduced staffing levels might continue as well.

    For businesses that can operate closer to full capacity, there is a little-known program called workshare unemployment.

    “The business owner has to initiate this plan, which is one reason it’s underutilized,” said Phineas Baxandall, an expert in social insurance at the Mass. Budget and Policy Center. “In workshare, if there are five employees, instead of laying one off, you put all five at 80 percent hours. All five take 20 percent of an unemployment check, which helps make up for the lost wages. For the duration of this year, the federal government is picking up the entire tab for those benefits.”

    That means these checks won’t count toward the employer’s next-year contribution to state unemployment insurance (U.I.). The employer is also paying less than full payroll, of course. And the employees each get the extra $600 a week until July 25, courtesy of the federal government. This benefit dwarfs the fractional check that each employee would normally get in workshare.

    In normal times, workshare is about saving on payroll while avoiding layoffs. But the feds have issued explicit guidance to employers ramping back up from a pandemic-caused closure: workshare may be used to gradually climb the ladder of increased demand. Employers put their employees into groups, and everyone in the group has to work the same fractional hours, between 40 and 90 percent of full time. The hours worked can increase — up to 90 percent of full-time — and employees will still receive the extra $600 a week, while costing the employer less than state-backed U.I.

    What About the Visas?

    In mid-March, U.S. embassies around the world suspended visa-related activities. The State Dept.’s website, however, shows that 556 J-1 student exchange visas had already been approved for the four Outer Cape towns before that happened.

    Patrick Patrick, owner of the Marine Specialties store in Provincetown, was contacted recently by a J-1 sponsor agency with a long questionnaire, asking about his plans for opening and for maintaining safety. Sponsor agencies have delayed their students’ arrivals in the U.S. — after all, there are no international flights to speak of, and most businesses are closed — but they haven’t canceled them.

    The H2-B program, however, is in a tighter spot. For that visa, businesses submit applications for a certain number of employees in difficult-to-fill positions, such as dishwashers and housekeepers. After going through a lottery in late February, applications representing 453 workers were approved in early March. Individual employees still have to be approved at U.S. embassies, however, and that step isn’t possible right now.

    If the embassies open in June, H2-Bs and J-1s might all be here by July. Many hotels and restaurants depend on these programs for staff. That means international air travel is just one more obstacle that some business owners have to consider before reopening.

     

    RELIEF

    The Cape’s Undocumented Workers on the Margins

    Most pay into the social safety net, but can’t benefit

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The coronavirus-induced collapse of the economy has people everywhere reaching for lifelines, from unemployment to SBA loans to MassHealth. At the edge of this scene is a group that is often overlooked — the Cape’s undocumented population is not eligible for most of the programs that help people.

    Most of the undocumented people who live and work on the Cape entered the country on legal work visas and then stayed in the U.S. when their visas expired, according to Collin Mickle, an immigration lawyer and coordinator of the Immigrant Resource Center in Hyannis.

    That means the majority of the Cape’s undocumented population pays payroll and income taxes, Mickle added. “Employment visa holders are assigned Social Security numbers when they first arrive,” Mickle explained. Even after their visas expire, they can generally work under those numbers, he said. When they do, employer and employee both pay Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and state family and medical leave taxes.

    “In addition, most of the overstay immigrants we see are paying income taxes, state and federal,” said Mickle. The IRS knows about immigrants and their wages and expects them to file tax returns, but is not allowed to refer people to immigration enforcement. “They want people to pay — not to discourage them from paying,” Mickle said.

    Visa overstays may pay into the American social safety net, but that doesn’t mean they can receive its benefits.

    Unemployment Closed

    Congress has radically expanded the unemployment system. It is the principal economic support for people who have lost work because of the pandemic. Benefits were increased, and the pool of people who are eligible for them has nearly doubled. But that expanded UI system is closed to the undocumented.

    There are some classes of immigrants who can file for unemployment in Massachusetts, according to Monica Halas, an unemployment law expert at Greater Boston Legal Services. Green card holders and people with an employment authorization document (EAD) can file. Those eligible for an EAD include refugees, asylum seekers, and persons with Temporary Protected Status or deferred action agreements.

    Still, the most common work visas used on the Cape, the J-1 and the H2-B, never result in this kind of categorical employment authorization. Rather, those visas are tied to specific employers and industries, and convey much more limited privileges.

    Access to at least some relief could come for people in mixed-immigration-status families, if one person qualifies for unemployment. For example, the expanded UI system allows students who work part-time to apply.

    MassHealth No, but a Safety Net

    MassHealth provides comprehensive, nearly-free health care to about a quarter of the state’s residents. It’s part of the federal Medicaid program, it’s mostly paid for with federal funds, and federal rules bar undocumented people from the program. But undocumented residents of Massachusetts can enroll in the Health Safety Net and get at least some of the advantages of health insurance.

    “For Health Safety Net, you prove that you live in the state, and you prove your identity, but you don’t prove your immigration status,” said Kelly Hewitt, program coordinator for access to health care at the Community Action Committee of Cape Cod and the Islands. Health Safety Net is not insurance, and it doesn’t pay for everything that insurance does. But it pays for a lot of things, and it can also help avoid a tangled snarl of medical bills, appeals, and complex paperwork after a hospital trip. Hewitt says people should sign up for Health Safety Net before they wind up needing it.

    The Community Action Committtee does not report information about people to ICE. “It’s safe for anyone to call us,” said Caronanne Procaccini, a director there.

    Another form of relief could eventually find its way to the Cape’s undocumented population, after taking a circuitous route from Congress through the SBA to local lenders and then local employers. The Payroll Protection Program, which now amounts to $660 billion in forgivable loans, specifically encourages employers to bring back their entire staff. The application requires employers to certify that the employees they are including reside primarily in the U.S., but does not ask that they verify citizenship.

    Rules for the program have changed often, and are still changing. But Mickle does not think this rule will. “The SBA is totally overwhelmed by the complexity and volume of these loans,” he said. “Is it likely that they’re going to put some kind of new, above-and-beyond scrutiny on everyone’s payroll, now? Particularly when the IRS doesn’t apply that scrutiny? Even if they did want to, I don’t think the bandwidth is there.”

    The Payroll Protection Program was intended to keep people employed. For the visa overstays who live on the edge in our economy, being employed has always been the only reliable plan.

     

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