Chamber seeks revival of worker program

The Point Roberts Chamber of Commerce is working to revive a discontinued visa program so that once the border fully opens again local businesses have access to adequate workers.

“When our border reopens, we will require 100-plus service industry workers here and we do not have them,” chamber president Brian Calder wrote in a memo to state attorney general Bob Ferguson. “We will be unable to attract them from Bellingham, some 50 miles and two international borders away.”

From 1984 to 2010, Point Roberts businesses could apply for a temporary worker visa for unskilled labor at the local border, usually receiving the visa in a matter of weeks. During the busy summer months restaurants, bars, the golf course and the marina depended on this process to hire Canadian summer help.

“When the sun comes out we need workers and we need them now,” said Kyle German, then the manager of the golf course, following the 2010 announcement by the Department of Homeland Security that the Point Roberts policy was being rescinded and that local businesses would need to follow the same rules going forward as any other business in the U.S.

Those rules require a certification from the U.S. Department of Labor that U.S. workers are not available to do the work, a costly and lengthy process. The memo establishing the service policy for part-time service workers for Point Roberts in 1984 stated that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which operated the port, had been notified by the state department of labor and industries that they can no longer issue labor certifications for Point Roberts workers “due to unique circumstances, including the isolation of Point Roberts from other United States communities.”

As a result, the INS dropped the labor certification requirement and established locally appropriate rules for visas and their processing.

When the Department of Homeland Security was formed in 2002 and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) took over from the INS at the local border, immigration matters like visas became the responsibility of a different branch of the agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS).

For the next eight years it was business as usual though for processing local temporary worker visas at the Point Roberts port of entry. Then in 2010 port director Omar Longoria announced the decision had been made for all visa processing to revert to the national CIS. “That’s just where the authority should be,” he said.

Bellingham immigration attorney Greg Boos has been advising the chamber and believes case law exists that provides an argument the policy should not have been rescinded. He points to a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1974 regarding a policy affecting cross-border commuters. The court held that “longstanding administrative construction is entitled to great weight,” especially when Congress has revisited relevant statutes since those administrative policies have been in place and left them untouched, which was the case for the Point Roberts temporary worker visa policy.

Boos has recommended that a task force be put together including “high level fellow travelers” familiar with the Point’s unique situation such as governor Jay Inslee and Congresswoman Suzan DelBene. This task force could work with the state attorney general’s office to request the federal government reestablish the policy and allow a visa program specific to Point Roberts labor needs.

“This was arbitrarily shut down. We wish to have this reinstated,” Calder said.