Increase Will Help Address the Need for Seasonal Workers and Reduce Irregular Migration
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in consultation with the Department of Labor (DOL), announced on Nov. 15, that it expects to make an additional 64,716 H-2B temporary nonagricultural worker visas available for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, on top of the congressionally mandated 66,000 H-2B visas that are available each fiscal year.
These additional H-2B visas represent the maximum permitted under the authority provided by Congress and are identical to the additional temporary visas provided in FY 2024.
Consistent with prior years, the Department is publicly announcing its plans to make these supplemental visas available early in FY 2025—just as it did in FY2023 and FY2024—to ensure American businesses with workforce needs are able to plan ahead and find the seasonal and other temporary workers they need.
At the same time, DHS and DOL have put in place robust protections for American and foreign workers alike, including by ensuring that employers first seek out and recruit American workers for the jobs to be filled, as the H-2B program requires, and that foreign workers hired are not exploited by unscrupulous employers.
The H-2B supplemental rule would include an allocation of 20,000 visas to workers from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, or Costa Rica and a separate allocation of 44,716 supplemental visas that would be available to returning workers who received an H-2B visa, or were otherwise granted H-2B status, during one of the last three fiscal years.
The regulation would allocate the supplemental visas for returning workers between the first half and second half of the fiscal year to account for the need for additional seasonal and other temporary workers over the course of the year, with a portion of the second half allocation reserved to meet the demand for workers during the peak summer season.
View the full CIS Press Release. Please stay tuned as we will provide additional details once the final rule is published.