Grow 3 (More) Reasons You May Not Want to Hire a Foreign Worker Than national debate over immigration is not the only reason why you may want -- I have a client who runs a very well-respected landscaping company in a suburb of Philadelphia. He wouldn't like to be featured in the article, so I'll call him Rick. For years, Rick's company has hired foreign workers. He says he needs to do this. The landscaping business is very competitive. He has a difficult time finding people to do the very physical work required. The work is seasonal so he can't guarantee -- this industry is very low) that he would find it very difficult to pay higher wages. And, worst of all, he has a very serious suspicion that a few his competitors uses and pays lower wages to illegal immigrants which allows them to undercut his pricing--a suspicion that he's never been able to prove. Rick brings his workers in under the government's H-2B Work Visa program which was created mainly for non-agricultural jobs in which there is a shortage of United States workers. There are up to 66,000 H-2B Visas issued annually. And now, after the horrific terror attack in Paris there's a backlash against not only bringing refugees into this country but an increasingly intense national debate over foreign workers and immigration. "Maybe I should just top using foreign workers altogether," he told me this weekend. He may have a point. If you're hiring foreign workers for your business, you're in the middle of a very passionate and public immigration debate which may not be a place where you want your -- Since 2006, Federal rules have required companies to notify their local unions if they are applying for foreign workers. Michael Cunningham, for example, who leads the Texas State Building & Construction Trades Council was reported to have "...studied the rules for hiring foreign workers and challenged many applications on simple errors like timeliness and proper job posting language, or on whether the jobs really were temporary. He also asked union leaders to demonstrate that enough U.S. workers were available to fill the jobs. If a company wanted 100 foreign welders, union members would flood the company's fax machine with rsums. Cunningham estimates that during the past decade the coordinated effort has kept more than 50,000 foreign construction workers from obtaining temporary visas to work in the U.S., including thousands along the Gulf Coast." Unions are not in favor of replacing their own, more skilled and (more importantly) dues paying members with lower cost workers from overseas and can cause trouble for those companies that take this direction. -- Besides the 66,000 H2B permits that Rick uses to attract seasonal workers to his company, the U.S. government issues 65,000 H1B work permits each year for foreigners who perform "specialty" work (i.e. STEM--science, technology, engineering, math). President Obama's executive actions for immigration has sought to not only grant legal citizenship status to many of those who came into the country illegally but to also increase the opportunities available to those foreign workers, particularly the ones with STEM qualifications, to also stay longer. A recent Federal court ruling rejected these actions and the appeals process is expected to ultimately take the matter to the U.S. -- controversial, keeping attorneys that specialize in this field very busy. And the debate in Washington continues. Even as some GOP candidates support building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants, a bill was introduced just this month in Congress to increase the number of unskilled foreign workers that firms can bring into this country for temporary work. It's a very fluid issue where people are taking sides. For Rick, hiring foreign workers puts his company in the middle of this national debate. "I cut lawns and do flower beds," he grumbled. "This is not the kind of attention I'm looking for." -- Finally, and more exasperatingly for small business owners like Rick is the competition they must face for foreign workers against some big, formidable opponents--particularly giant outsourcing firms that are hired by giant corporations and who, according to this New York Times -- particularly in the wake of terrorism fears and immigration concerns could further limit his options. And corporate America will always have more resources to win more workers. Hiring foreign workers is becoming just too risky.