Let’s pretend that you’re the manager of a major high-end resort property that brings thousands of visitors into the local community each month. Your facility is located in an area with almost no unemployment, expensive housing and limited public transportation. Entry-level jobs go begging all over the place – hamburger flippers are getting hiring bonuses and even then annual turnover approaches 100 percent.
And your clients aren’t going to tolerate a casual, inexperienced staff serving them. You have advertised, held job fairs and even tried to get your present employees to recruit their friends. Nothing has worked.
So what do you do? Well if you’re running the Grand Hotel at Point Clear, and you’ve tried pretty much all of the above in one form or another, you turn to something that is widely used in the hospitality industry: “Guest Workers.” Operating within the regulations and guidelines of the Department of Naturalization and Immigration you hire foreign nationals to work at your hotel. Many are students who use this opportunity to round out their college experience and make a little money while doing it. Some just want the experience of living and working in the United States – and maybe even have a little fun.
Whether students or some other category of permitted foreign workers, all of these short-term employees are going home at the end of their approved work period. They aren’t trying to immigrate to the U.S., they just want a work experience that will do more than just earn some money. And unlike the often feared and maligned illegal immigrants, these guest workers have to go through a series of checks and screenings that approach those used to grant security clearances to U.S. citizens. It’s tough to get in and those who make it represent a fairly elite segment of their home society – not just somebody off the street responding to an entry-level job.
One of the collateral benefits of this program is the chance for foreign residents to experience what Americans are really like. Everyone they meet while here in Baldwin County has a chance to win the hearts and minds of these working visitors. This isn’t just a program to fill otherwise vacant jobs at a hotel, it’s a chance to show people what we’re like.
It’s a chance to welcome these young people into our community, for them to live and work with regular, plain old Americans in this “Land of the free and home of the brave.” They can take a message to all points of the globe that this indeed is a “Bright and shining city on the hill, a beacon for….”
Hold it! Stop! Cut the music, turn off the fireworks and furl those flags – all that’s part of some other story. The rest of this one’s something completely different.
In our story, the hotel – to ensure that the “Guest Workers” had a good place to live near their work – had a group of houses built in an area of the county that would allow this kind of small development – a part of the county that in fact had recently rejected land-use planning.
There was nothing sneaky on the part of the hotel – the purpose for the construction was clear and the permits from nearby Fairhope were all in order. And what has been built is a street of small two-story buildings that look much like a mid-range subdivision styled along the lines of old parts of Savannah or Charleston. Attractive and efficient – minimal impact on the rural area around it and close enough to the residents’ jobs to add little traffic and use few resources in getting to work.
However the public reaction from the community has been virtually all negative – even hostile. The dramatic issue is that the site is near a school. Concerned citizens and school officials attacked the project as dangerous. Children could be at risk – the school should have had prior warning, said some. You just don’t know what sort of people these foreigners are – other countries don’t have accurate sexual-offender lists like we do, opined others. They even attacked Mayor Kant for being aware of this project and not alerting the community.
Alerting everyone to what? Some apartments are being built for use by employees of a local business. These employees happen to be non-residents of the US, but all are here legally, and only after having passed a series of checks no US citizen would be subjected to before moving in.
The implication that foreign visitors are more likely than the native population to be child molesters is just appalling. I guess we should be happy nobody picked up on Lou Dobb’s (inaccurate) claim that each year thousands of foreign lepers enter the US – but it’s cold comfort.
And this was not all. From the surrounding community came the economic-based criticism that all this should be done – but for local residents. Why should foreigners from thousands of miles away benefit, while un- or under-employed native-born Americans living within in a few hundred yards of the hotel are ignored? Jobs and housing should be reserved for Americans – apparently regardless of qualification or motivation – was the bottom-line message from this faction.
This is not the American civics lesson I hoped would be taken back home when these temporary workers leave. This is not something that speaks well of our community in general. While Mobile celebrates globalization with a new steel plant from Germany, the Eastern Shore seems willing to return to the isolationism of the 1930s.
And think this all started when the management at The Grand tried to meet their business needs and do a little good at the same time.
Contact Pete Gleszer at jubilee@lagniappemobile.com.
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