BRANSON, MO PUERTO
RICANS
HARI SREENIVASAN:
A year ago, Brenda Alicea was unemployed and having a tough time finding work
in her town of San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico. In the midst of the largest financial
crisis in the island’s history, job prospects dimmed by the day on the U.S.
territory.
Then her brother-in-law
told her there were plenty of jobs here in Branson Missouri. Located in
the Ozarks, it’s the self-proclaimed “Las Vegas of the Midwest”. The city of
about 11,000 residents sees up to 9 million tourists every season. But
it also faces a labor shortage, with around 2,000 job vacancies, mostly in
hospitality.
EXPRESS EMPLOYMENT
PROFESSIONALS RECRUITMENT VIDEO:
“One of the challenges
we have in Branson is that we have lots of jobs because we are a Hospitality
town.”
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Starting in early 2017,
even before Hurricane Maria, Branson’s major employers and its chamber of
commerce launched an island-wide recruitment campaign in Puerto Rico, hoping to
woo seasonal workers.
BRENDA
ALICEA:
It's very peaceful. You have a lot of nature and that's what we were looking
for, at least what I'm looking for.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
She moved to Branson
last September and worked as a housekeeper before eventually getting a job as a
ticket agent at the Branson airport. Her husband found temporary construction
work.
BRENDA ALICEA:
I said, ‘If the schools
are good, I will go there.’ Because I wanted my son to graduate.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
They brought their
14-year-old son Kelier, who had been diagnosed with a
learning disability in Puerto Rico.
BRENDA ALICEA:
He is now doing better.
All he does is say, "You know what? I love this school. I wanna keep on studying." And that's what I want.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
She left her then
17-year-old daughter with a relative to finish her senior year of high school.
BRENDA ALICEA:
I'm not saying that
everything is perfect, but they have been treating me so nice. You go to a
Walmart store and they just, "Hi, how are you? How are you doing?" We
don’t know them. We’re like, wow!
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Three days after Brenda
got to Branson, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, making it even harder
for the already cash-strapped government to provide basic services like
electricity and water. The unemployment rate there is almost 10%, more than
double the national average.
BRENDA
ALICEA:
They still need help. Also, the streets, there's a lot of potholes, like,
they're bigger than ever.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
So the infrastructure is still suffering?
BRENDA ALICEA:
Yes. It's devastated.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Some 400 Puerto Ricans
like Brenda have come to work in Branson since the city began its mass
recruitment effort.
HARI SREENIVASAN
Towns like Branson are
recruiting from Puerto Rico in part because temporary worker visas, the H2B and
the J-1, became much harder to get over the past two years. And people from
Puerto Rico are American citizens.
JEFF SEIFRIED:
Uncertainty is never a
great business plan. And that's what we found with the visa programs.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Jeff Seifried
is President of the Branson/Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce.
JEFF SEIFRIED:
A number of applications
were denied. And so we went into emergency mode on trying to figure out how we
were going to fill-- the more than 2,000 vacancies-- open positions in the
marketplace.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
He says that the U.S.
Guest worker program has always been used as a political football. But things
got especially difficult last year after congress failed to extend a key
exemption for returning guest workers. The exemption previously allowed
those workers to come from abroad season after season and they did not count
toward the annual cap of 66,000 h2b visas available.
JEFF SEIFRIED:
There's been a lot of discussion about immigration, obviously, across the
country. But I think what's happened is the temporary workforce programs have
gotten mixed up in this immigration discussion, and frankly, inappropriately
so.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
While Seifried and his team continue to lobby the federal
government for temporary workforce visa reform, recruiting workers from Puerto
Rico is a top priority. Employers from Branson are also branching out to
Florida, where state researchers project more than 50,000 Puerto Ricans will
permanently settle as a result of the hurricane.
JEFF SEIFRIED:
Our main concern in Branson is to make sure that anyone working here
temporarily is going to have a good experience. Whether
that's doing cultural immersion classes or Spanish classes educating the
business community is part of this whole landscape.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
To attract new workers,
many employers offer round-trip plane tickets, some moving expenses, and
housing assistance.
JOSE RAMIREZ:
Food was provided. Airplane ticket to get over here was provided. We came over
here with maybe 200 bucks in our pocket. And now we got everything.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Last May, Ana Rey and
her husband, Jose Ramirez, were recruited by the staffing agency, Express
Employment Professionals, and moved to Branson with their two children. Puerto
Rico’s education department shut down their daughter’s school in the town of
Carolina because of the island’s financial crisis.
ANA REY:
We looked up the education here in Branson, and it sounded excellent.
JOSE RAMIREZ:
It looked like a new place, a new beginning. They were showing us
pictures about the area and we loved it. I mean, it's not crowded. It's not
city-like. So we thought about our kids, our future, and we took it.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Ana works as a
housekeeper at a local resort, where Jose also works as a security guard.
JOSE RAMIREZ:
You know, every two weeks we see somebody new from Puerto Rico. "Hey, I'm
from this part of the island. I'm from this other part of the island. How long
you been here? One week. I'm scared. I don't know what to do. Hey, man, we been
here for a year and a half. And it's a transition, but you're gonna love it."
HARI SREENIVASAN:
He makes 11 dollars an
hour and Ana makes just over 12. They say with a lower cost of living in
Branson, their money goes further here than it did back home.
JEFF SEIFRIED:
They can make-- upwards
of $12, $13, $14, $15 an hour and then take that money and go home when they're
ready.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
There are going to be people who push back and say, ‘Listen, this is a way for
businesses to get away with paying people less-- you're actually decreasing the
floor here-- you're keeping wages suppressed by bringing in labor from outside
the-- the region.’
JEFF SEIFRIED:
You know I challenge back on that that topic because what we hear from the
business community is we would gladly pay the going rate and for our market,
those are those are good wages. And so to say that we don't want to hire locals
or we don't want to invest in locals is just not true. The reality is, we can't
find an available labor pool locally to meet the need.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Branson, Missouri isn’t
the only place recruiting workers from Puerto Rico because of labor shortages.
Firms in Maine, South Carolina and Massachusetts have done so as well. Several
offer housing, and one medical device maker in Warsaw, Indiana, even provided
their new hires with cars.
Coxhealth Medical Center, the Branson area’s largest healthcare system, just
hired 20 new nurses from Puerto Rico due to a nursing shortage. In addition to
providing housing assistance and some moving expenses, the hospital will
assign each new hire with a mentor. William Mahoney is the Branson hospital’s
president.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
When you first heard about the idea to recruit from Puerto Rico, what did you
think?
WILLIAM MAHONEY:
I thought it was a great idea. And think about this, you can come here
and make over $40,000 a year, up to $100,000 a year. We're helping pay for--
certifications they can gain. And the more certifications you gain, the more
pay that you can earn. If we take care of our people well, they take care of
our patients well.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
And jobs here at the
hospital provide the opportunity for year round work.
HARI
SREENIVASAN:
You're not like a hotel. You need full-time, 12-months-a-year coverage.
WILLIAM MAHONEY:
We want you to move here. Not seasonally, we want your family to be
here. And I think how we work with the first group that works here,
that's our best selling point is to tell their friends and neighbors who they
have relationships with, "Hey, this is a great place.”
HARI SREENIVASAN:
But so far, most of the
400 Puerto Rican workers have come to work temporarily in hospitality, like
33-year-old hector Ochoa. He came to Branson last October to work as a travel
consultant at a resort.
HECTOR OCHOA:
Mostly I wanted to learn
how big businesses like this work, how the marketing side to it works, how the
selling process of it works. I came here with that mindset.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Are you going to try to
stay?
HECTOR OCHOA:
I'm going to try to stay
as long as I can and as I see fit to, you know, return to Puerto Rico. I plan
to return to Puerto Rico.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
You do.
HECTOR OCHOA:
Yeah, of course. I do. For
me, it was more like-- leaving for a while and concentrating on what I want to
do and, you know, kind of return with, like, a good base under my feet, you
know?
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Hector makes 11 dollars
an hour. Every week he pays 75 dollars back to his employer for a shared
room in this trailer that houses 7 guest workers.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
So is this working out
for you financially?
HECTOR OCHOA:
I wouldn't say it's
working. It's not where I want to be financially. So the finances right now,
I'm kind of pushing them to the side, even though I'm making money.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
As for
Brenda Alicea, though she found
permanent work and makes 10.50 an hour, she says it’s been tough to make ends
meet. Her husband’s temporary construction work in Branson was inconsistent,
and he moved to Orlando, Florida to try his luck there. Brenda believes she’ll
likely follow, reluctantly, because her son has been thriving at his new school
just outside of Branson.
BRENDA ALICEA:
Now he’s not in the special education program. He’s doing well. I've done it
all for him.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Yeah. Worth it?
BRENDA ALICEA:
Yes, sir. Definitely.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
Unlike Brenda and
hector, Jose and Ana plan to make a life here in Branson, knowing their family
and friends are still back in Puerto Rico.
ANA REY:
It was really hard for me to leave them behind. Every
time I talk to them it hurts. It saddens me. But I tell them, if you’re ready
and you want to come, just let me know.
JOSE RAMIREZ:
It worked out for us.
100%.
###
|
|
TIMECODE |
LOWER
THIRD |
|
1 |
0:36 |
RECRUITMENT VIDEO |
|
2 |
0:55 |
BRENDA ALICEA RELOCATED FROM PUERTO RICO |
|
3 |
2:17 |
BRANSON, MO HARI SREENIVASAN @HARI |
|
4 |
2:30 |
JEFF SEIFRIED BRANSON/LAKES AREA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE |
|
5 |
4:12 |
JOSE RAMIREZ RELOCATED FROM PUERTO RICO |
|
6 |
4:40 |
ANA REY RELOCATED FROM PUERTO RICO |
|
7 |
7:01 |
WILLIAM MAHONEY COX MEDICAL CENTER BRANSON |
|
8 |
7:50 |
HECTOR OCHOA RELOCATED FROM PUERTO RICO |