Firms in Utah Preparing to Hire Mexicans

DENVER – Utah businessmen are preparing to hire potentially thousands of Mexican temporary workers.

Representatives of several chambers of commerce and business groups met last week in Utah with local public officials and representatives of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon to learn about a new state law, HB466, and about the procedure for processing H2B visas.

The entry into force of HB466 would allow businessmen to hire up to 16,000 temporary workers from Nuevo Leon, the state with which the Utah government signed an agreement to establish a pilot program.

Although the federal government still must give its final approval to the initiative because the preestablished number of 66,000 H2B visas has already been exceeded for this year, businessmen from Salt Lake City, Provo and other cities attended seminars to learn how to process those visas.

Ben Wallace, assistant general manager of a Resorts West luxury rental establishment in Park City, told reporters that the seminars sparked a high level of interest because “we’re not finding enough people in our area” to work in jobs like cleaning and maintainence at hotels during the winter season.

Tim Wheelwright, an immigration attorney with Durham Jones & Pinegar and the presenter of the seminars in Utah, said that the approval of HB466 indicates that “we want to play by the rules. We want to promote legal immigration.”

However, he said, the H2B visa system is very complicated.

If the rules change or if the federal government decides to limit the number of H2B visas that it authorizes in a certain year, businessmen run the risk of investing thousands of dollars in advertising and in immigration procedures without then being able to count on having the workers they need, the lawyer said.

As a way to limit that risk, Utah signed a cooperation agreement with the Nuevo Leon Migrant Attention Center.

The center’s Carlos Ocadiz told the Utah businessmen that Nuevo Leon is helping process the H2B visas via the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, Mexico.

According to Ocadiz, almost 84 percent of the total number of H2B visas authorized annually by the United States are processed at the Monterrey consulate and 94 percent of those visas are approved.

Ocadiz said that 98 percent of the Mexicans who arrive in the United States with those temporary visas return to Mexico when the visas expire, generally after 10 months. EFE