The announcement last week that Arkansas Global Connect of Conway had been acquired by BDV Solutions of Greenville, South Carolina, reflects the business opportunity for specialists in arranging temporary worker visas.
Randy Zook, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce and the Associated Industries of Arkansas, called seasonal labor “a pressing need” in Arkansas and beyond.
“The need has become even more acute as time has passed …,” Zook said. “We just don’t have enough people who are willing and able and in the right places to meet the need of a lot of Arkansas enterprises.”
Employers desperate for labor “are happy to pay for” a service to line up legal, seasonal labor, Zook said. “There is a market solution for our immigration mess.”
That has been Arkansas Global Connect’s experience, CEO Dana Deree told Arkansas Business.
“It is complex to follow labor law, immigration law, to recruit from another country,” Deree said. “It is not expensive, in my view, but neither is it cost-free. The only thing that is more expensive is not having the workforce you need to meet your obligations, to keep your doors open, to expand.”
AGC placed seasonal workers with more than 200 employers in more than 30 states since its launch in September 2021. Its 11 employees — three in Arkansas and the rest in Honduras — will all continue working for BDV, which was looking to expand its menu of immigration programs and strategies.
The terms of the cash and equity sale were not disclosed.
“I just spent a week in Greenville, and our approach is very similar,” he said of BDV. “They are absolutely devoted to doing things ethically and legally, meeting both the needs of the clients and making sure that the folks we recruit are treated well.”
Deree, an Arkansas native, spent 20 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, ultimately as consul general in Honduras, where he helped improve the employer-seasonal worker process. That experience led him and three others to invest $50,000 each to found AGC with the mission of providing American employers with an efficient pipeline of reliable seasonal workers from abroad while opening a door of economic opportunity for job seekers.
While the company has been profitable from its first year, the business plan did not turn out to be what Deree and his partners expected. Instead of placing mainly farm workers with H-2A agricultural visas, AGC has mainly recruited and placed nonagricultural seasonal workers using the H-2B visa program, which the Biden administration expanded in the face of widespread worker shortages following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our logo is farm fields because I thought we would do 98% farm workers because there would not be enough H-2Bs available,” Deree said. “Instead, we’ve been so busy with H-2Bs that AGC has done very little farm labor.”
Elevating Wages
Arkansas Global Connect’s clients have come from food processing, manufacturing, landscaping, events, movers and “a lot of hospitality,” Deree said. In some areas, even fast-food restaurants can qualify for H-2B workers because of significant variation in seasonal demand.
“The key thing is [the work] needs to be seasonal, up to 10 months a year,” he said. And any employer seeking H-2A or H-2B visas “has to show that they have tried to fill the jobs with U.S. workers, so this is also good for U.S. workers.”
Temporary foreign workers must be paid prevailing wages for specific work in a specific place. “We’re not bringing down wages,” Deree said. “As a matter of fact, we’re elevating wages for U.S. workers. These days, with the labor shortage, with our clients, they are already offering at or above prevailing wage.”
In a stroke of luck for startup AGC, the Biden administration began supplementing the normal annual cap of 66,000 H-2B visas in the fall of 2021. For the current fiscal year, an additional 64,716 were available, and 20,000 of them were reserved for workers from specific Latin American countries — including Honduras, where Deree had extensive expertise and contacts. (The other favored countries are Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti.)
Legal seasonal work in the U.S. can help stabilize migration patterns, Deree said, “taking away the pressure from large numbers of people to make that dangerous journey.”
Zook, the state chamber CEO, said temporary workers are vital to tourism and hospitality. “You wouldn’t have Highway 30A without H2-Bs,” he said of the scenic drive along the Gulf of Mexico in Florida’s Panhandle. “All of that short-term, seasonal work is H2-Bs.”
Seasonal workers clean houses and hotels and staff the restaurants and bars, Zook said.
“We don’t have enough people. That’s all there is to it. We don’t have enough workforce with the right skills and willingness in the right places to meet the needs of U.S. businesses.
“And anybody who says you just have to pay more should take a look at what’s going on in California with the $20 minimum wage.”
Sign up for Daily E-news
