The Atlantic: Many Americans Want Work, but They Don’t Want to Mow Lawns

Most American homeowners are possessive and protective of their lawns, but they are less picky about who maintains them: One in three Americans who have lawns say they hired landscapers to maintain their yards in the past year. The national obsession with manicured lawns has helped propel landscaping into a $76-billion industry that has grown about 3 percent each year. Whether it means finding the right fertilizer or bagging up stray leaves, Americans are willing to shell out about $600 a year for someone else to handle their outdoor maintenance.

But finding people willing to do yard work is getting harder and harder for professional landscapers. Owners of landscaping businesses are saying that their biggest challenge is finding people who will prune bushes in the middle of the summer, in the heat, for the wages they pay. So it's no wonder, then, that the landscaping industry has become the largest employer of foreign, non-agricultural guest workers. “It's the very nature of the work. The guest workers who come over year after year are willing to put in the hours and difficult labor,” says Paul Mendelsohn, the vice president of government relations for the National Association of Landscape Professionals, a trade group. About 500 or 600 of the association’s roughly 2,500 member businesses use the H-2B visa program, which allows employers seeking seasonal help to bring foreign workers from abroad for up to 10 months at a time (and which is not to be confused with the more well-known H-2A program for agricultural workers). [...]

Because it involves bringing in foreign workers, the H-2B program has drawn the ire of organized labor. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly told Congress that there aren’t enough Americans willing to take temporary jobs—at amusement parks, ski resorts, hotels—but unions say that’s just not true, and that companies are trying to save money on labor costs by exploiting cheap foreign workers at the expense of Americans. In June, representatives from North America’s Building Trades Unions said in a Senate hearing that the program is just a tool for roofing companies to pay $8 an hour to a foreigner instead of $22 an hour to a union member. The Southern Poverty Law Center has even gone as far as comparing the guest-worker programs to modern-day slavery. Yet there is hardly any independent research on how temporary workers affect the demand for American labor.

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