Two signs outside AAA Landscape, 4742 N. Romero Road, say "Now hiring."
But the signs are permanent. Company president Richard Underwood said he is always hiring.
He tries everything he can think of. Besides advertisements, he goes to high school job fairs and has hired some teenagers through an agricultural science education program. He has hired workers through Jobs for Life, a faith-based job-training program for people who struggle with work. And he works with tribal employment offices.
To shore up his labor force, he has turned to the existing federal program for hiring seasonal foreign workers. Now he has 20 foreign employees on H-2B temporary-worker visas. AAA Landscape has 120 more in Phoenix. The 140 H-2B workers make up about a quarter of its work force.
Even in the industries most populated by illegal immigrants, some employers try to hire foreign nationals legally. They find it's a hard road to take.
A few miles southwest at the JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort & Spa, 3800 W. Starr Pass Blvd., human resources director Susan Miller said she has 100 openings today, and some positions have been vacant since the resort opened two years ago.
Marriott, too, has tried to dip into all the available labor pools. The company is involved with job-placement agencies that serve disabled people and recently invited job-training groups to work with it.
For both companies, it would be easy to hire illegal immigrants, but they have committed to hiring foreigners the legal way.
It's frustrating to turn away qualified workers whose Social Security numbers don't check out, Underwood said, but "because we're a leader in this industry, because of our moral and spiritual values, we are scrupulous."
The foreign workers " don't take anybody's jobs. They take jobs we can't fill," Underwood said.
Miller agreed.
"If we could find people in Tucson to fill all of these positions, we wouldn't be involved in the H-2B program. It's a huge expense for us," she said.
Foreign workers seek stability
AAA Landscape's temporary workers arrived in Tucson Feb 1. The company arranged the leases for their apartments, set up their utilities and picked them up in a company van the next morning before the sky turned from black to blue.
Francisco Labastida Sanchez, 21, of Querétaro, Mexico, started with AAA Landscape three years ago. He's paid $10.50 an hour, and he paid his $1,000 H-2B application fee with money he saved from working in Tucson last year.
"I just want stable work," he said through a translator, as he filled in irrigation trenches along the shoulder of a new road on the far East Side. It's not hard to find work in Querétaro, he said, but the wages are low and he'd like to be able to buy a house in Mexico someday.
Miguel Sanchez Fabian, 20, is from the same farming town as Labastida Sanchez and has also been working in Tucson for three years. He sends most of his money home to his wife and parents.
"The first year, I came to check out how things were here. The second year, I came with the mentality of learning more and getting used to the trade. Now it's routine," he said. He likes the work and wants to climb the ladder at AAA, he added.
H-2B Visas
There are about 10 types of temporary work visas, and they have real benefits and consequences for the employers and workers, said consultant Jan Thurgood. His Phoenix-based company, Corporate Employee Services, helps employers, including AAA Landscape, get through the complicated application process.
The H-2B visas are for seasonal workers and it's up to employers to prove they need workers on a temporary basis. Companies also must show they have a viable business that can support a permanent staff as well as temporary workers, Thurgood said.
Most H-2B visa workers come here for nine or 10 months and spend two months with their families at home. It's about a three-month wait between filing the paperwork and receiving foreign workers on their first day, Thurgood said.
The problem with the H-2B program is that the visas simply aren't available to many employers.
There are only 66,000 H-2B temporary visas available each year nationwide, not including returning workers, whose visas are renewable for up to three years. They are offered in April and October and are gone in a few weeks each time. The 33,000 visas that were offered last October were gone by the end of November.
It costs more than $5,700 a year per person in processing fees to participate in the H-2B program, Underwood said. Plus, each worker pays a $1,000 application fee.
In contrast, the penalty for knowingly hiring an illegal immigrant is $275 to $2,200 per person for the first offense.
Workers hard to find
When the Marriott Starr Pass opened in Tucson two years ago, the company didn't have any visa workers on site.
"We were killed," Miller said. Much of the staff put in overtime work to do jobs that weren't yet filled in dishwashing, cleaning and housekeeping.
"We couldn't find individuals in the community who wanted these positions," she said. In fact, she has never been able to fill some of the cooking jobs.
"I do believe that a lot of our youth or people entering the job marketing for the first time have a different idea of what their first job is going to be and going to pay, so it's unattractive to them," Miller said.
But most of Marriott's executives started out washing dishes or taking reservations, she said. Now, she added, it's hard to find "people who understand it's an honor to serve other people and it's an honorable profession."
The Marriott is paying slightly above the local market rate in order to recruit the best employees, Miller said. Starting pay is $7.75 to $8 an hour with benefits.
Now, the Marriott Starr Pass employs 90 Jamaican workers — a little more than a tenth of its staff. They work there for nine months out of the year.
The Jamaican workers have extra incentives to work hard, Miller said, "because this is so important for them, and getting a visa and getting invited is predicated on their ability to do the job well."
Marriott also works with a staffing company, Alliance Abroad Group, to make arrangements for the H-2B workers.
"Having experts, to me, is really the only way to go. You know you've done everything you need to do," Miller said.
Companies not luring citizens
Companies are supposed to give legal residents or citizens of the United States the chance to take the jobs first, but some aren't successful in hiring Americans.
"They're constantly advertising and trying every measure to open up to the public and say, 'Hey, we've got jobs!' But nobody applies," Thurgood said. "Or, they work there for a day or two, find out what the work's like and leave."
That's a problem that could be solved in other ways, said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that opposes illegal immigration.
He argues the labor market isn't as tight as business owners have described and points out there are about 17,000 unemployed people in Tucson .
"There's a huge supply of people who could fill those jobs," Camarota said. And more of them would want to take jobs as landscapers, construction workers and cooks if the jobs paid better and were less uncomfortable, he added. Companies could also look at technology that saves time and labor, he said.
"It's better to draw Americans into the labor market rather than transferring lots of unskilled workers into the labor market from other countries," Camarota said.
Underwood said he hires every legal, qualified worker he can find. But he said fewer young people are entering the work force, more are staying in school and fewer are interested in trades.
"Honest labor seems to have lost its panache or something," he said.
Besides, AAA's staff isn't underpaid, he said. Entry-level workers make $8 an hour to start. A worker with an H-2B visa and three years of experience at AAA Landscape makes $10.50 an hour, above the average wage of $9.67 an hour that landscaping workers in Tucson get.
Last year, the company did $40 million of business. Underwood said it could have easily done $7 million to $10 million more — with afull staff.
"We could have taken on another 20 workers in Tucson," Underwood said. "We turned away work because we couldn't staff it. It has hindered our growth."
Employers want in on the immigration debate
Sheridan Bailey, owner of a steel-fabrication company in Phoenix, said his labor shortage spurred him to start Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform.
"About a year ago, we began to see that no matter how often we advertised in the newspaper, we couldn't get qualified workers. More recently, we couldn't even get any applicants," he said.
"The government restricts the flow of a vital resource: labor," Bailey said. "It's slowing down the growth of my business."
Through the reform program, he is encouraging business owners to talk to each other and to their legislators "about the reality that we deal with." The truth is that the existing temporary-worker programs aren't providing enough people to fill in labor shortages, Bailey said.
To learn more about Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform, visit www.azsip.org.
