Patti Ann Moskwa is part travel agent, part mother hen as she tracks flights from Jamaica to Mackinac Island. She’s responsible for the small group of workers who are arriving in the U.S. to work at her restaurant for the summer.
She counsels the travelers as they miss their connecting flight in Miami due to a four-hour customs line. Then she rebooks the flight to Detroit, but she’s out of luck rebooking a flight to Pellston, just 20 minutes south of Mackinaw City. In the end she pays $900 for an Uber to bring the group from one end of the state to the other so she can get them across Lake Huron.
From one island to the next, Moskwa is their lifeline through WhatsApp. It’s one of many stressful, sleepless nights she has waiting for her H-2B visa workers to arrive for the summer.
Migrant workers on a H-2B temporary visa can work six-month seasons. This visa is specifically used for non-agricultural work and is popular within the tourism industry.
On Mackinac Island, migrant workers are crucial to the labor force.
Mackinac Island has about 500 permanent residents. In the summer, an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 workers arrive for peak season, which runs April to November. That seasonal workforce includes an estimated 1,000 migrant workers coming from across the globe on work visas, according to the Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau.
The program comes at a great cost to employers who are responsible for lawyers, fees, travel, housing and increasing wage rates. Rising prices are impacting all of those costs, as well. Moskwa purchased several $1,500 airline tickets to bring over servers and dishwashers for her restaurant Yankee Rebel Tavern.
“People just don’t understand what employers go through to be on this program,” Moskwa said. “It’s not cheap. It’s very frustrating, and it’s very stressful.”
Related: Michigan leans on migrant workers amid labor shortage
Every year Moskwa petitions for a set number of work visas to fill out her staff. This year, 25 employees of her 75-person staff will travel internationally to be there.
This process starts in January in preparation for the summer season, but there is no guarantee visa petitions will be filled.
Congress has capped the number of H2-B workers to 66,000 per fiscal year, 33,000 for winter and 33,000 summer for the entire country. The cap has not changed since 1990, despite rapidly increasing demand for guest workers.
The labor pool in Michigan is shrinking, and finding domestic labor becomes increasingly difficult when looking to secure applicants who want to work seasonally and live on an island. Employers who petition for visas must show positions have been posted and made available to Americans first.
Every year positions go unfilled – until migrant workers can apply.
“[I had] 114 applicants and not one was an American,” Moskwa said.
The tourism industry is leaning on the lottery even more heavily to the point where immigration lawyer Scott Patterson is getting busier every season.
“What I sense in my clients is a desperation,” he said. “They are having great difficulties satisfying their labor needs and this is one way that they can at least take a shot at it.”
In Michigan 4,132 jobs were certified for H2-B visas, according to Department of Labor data from the first two quarters of 2022. Michigan ranks in the top 10 states requesting these temporary visas.
Patterson, who is based in Troy, has clients across the country vying for the same 33,000 summer visas. This season he said his clients had about an 80% success rate.
“There was a time, 15 or 20 years ago, where you could just decide you wanted H-2B labor and go through the process. You were almost guaranteed of getting what you wanted. Those days are long passed,” he said.
Related: Michigan needs more workers from abroad, but migrant worker authorization rare, costly
Playing the labor lottery is a huge gamble for resorts who rely on the visa program to fill large swaths of their staff.
Mission Point Resort requested 147 visas for positions across the board – housekeeping, guest services, bartending, serving.
Only 12 visas were approved for this summer, said Liz Ware, Vice President of Sales and Marketing.
“Hospitality is a tough business to begin with,” she said. “Hospitality in northern Michigan, on an island, being seasonal is probably the toughest of tough. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
This summer’s schedule is heavy with events and weddings so it will be all hands on deck at Mission Point.
“It is not unusual to see my brother in a bellman’s uniform or for me to be in a housekeeping uniform,” Ware said.
Ware and her brother Mark, who co-own the resort, recruit year-round as a failsafe to the lottery’s unpredictable nature.
The resort hasn’t been able to operate all three of its restaurants due to staff shortages. This summer will be the first time in four years all are open. To make it work, the Wares have patchworked together staffing from visa programs, domestic workers and American and international college students. Fall will require another big push for recruitment.
“There are not enough U.S. workers,” Ware said. “As much as we would hire U.S. first, that’s always, always the goal, we’re not seeing any demand for dishwashers. We’re not seeing any demand for some of these positions at all.”
Related: The state needs ‘Pure Michigan’ magic to revive its shrinking talent pool
Strategic staffing is imperative for large employers like The Grand Hotel. David Jurcak, president of operations, describes the hotel’s evolving and expanding recruitment as “casting another net in another pond.”
“You’ve got to fill the funnel,” he said. “You have to find a lot of people and talk to a lot of people to try and dwindle it down to get to the roughly 600 to 700 people that we need to work at our hotel over a course the season to be successful.”
Last summer, the hotel had the worst luck in the visa lottery to date. As a result, it had to cap its occupancy for Fourth of July weekend.
This summer, its fortunes have changed.
The Grand Hotel usually staffs 350 H2-B workers across 17 different job categories. The visa lottery fulfilling the majority of those petitions, coupled with the hotel working with the federal government to recruit heavily in the Northern Triangle set up a smoother summer.
“We have more team members on staff than we did at any point last year,” Jurcak said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re fully staffed.”
Jurcak wants to capitalize on Mackinac Island’s strong Midwestern visitor base. The recruitment team is visiting colleges in Indiana and Wisconsin hoping students who have visited the island will return for the unique work experience.
The tourism industry has shied away from relying too heavily on students because their work schedules are limited to school breaks, but a tight labor market has made them a hot commodity.
Adding fresh faces is also as an opportunity to grow the hospitality industry as it slowly rebuilds from its pandemic losses, Jurcak said.
“We’re resilient industry,” he said. “As long as the industry, as a whole, remembers who we are and what we are about – people serving people. At the end of the day, [we] take care of those people who serve other people.”
More on MLive:
Immigration is saving Michigan from population loss, but state falls far behind national averages
Flip phones, fashion and faucets: Barrels bound for home a Mackinac Island tradition
Up north tourists box out housing for local workers. Employers are building their own.
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