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Sunday, February 22, 2015

It May Be Freezing, But Many Thinking Summer, As International Student Worker Recruitment In Full Swing

OCEAN CITY — While snow fell on Ocean City this week and spring seems as far away as ever, efforts were already underway in places like Moldova and Poland to fill out the resort’s summer workforce with international students from around the globe.

Each year, several hundred J-1 visa-carrying international university students arrive in Ocean City for up to four months to work and play and enjoy all the resort has to offer. They come from all over the world and make up a significant part of the resort’s summer workforce. Under the J-1 summer work and travel program, university students from outside the U.S. can enter the country and work for a period of up to four months. The visa also allows for a 30-day travel period before the students return to their native countries to begin their next semester.

While the concept seems simple on the surface, recruiting the student workers, getting their visas and paperwork in order, and finding them places to live and work in Ocean City is a complicated process. Private companies, such as United Work and Travel, for example, find the students and make arrangements for them to live in work in Ocean City. It’s a process that begins almost as soon as the last batch of international students from last year has returned home.

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19 comments:

Anonymous said...

Put as much effort in hiring local people!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Half of them will become illegal and disappear

Anonymous said...

They hire them so they can underpay and screw them over and any legal recourse comes too late because their time is up. I've seen massive overtime w/o time and a half, bonus programs amounting to $1000+ not paid out. There was even this fruit cake named Patrick McGonigle who made his foreign workers run his business for near minimum wage. He would take emoyee tips and forced workers to clean his crippled boyfriends urine off the bathroom floor because he wasn't able to aim and refused to sit. ill not buy from ANY resort businesses that have all foreign student workers because of this kind of treatment.

Anonymous said...

Whats the matter with american kids these days,are they really that lazy?

Anonymous said...

Local people dont want to work. They fell self entitled to our hard earned tax dollars supporting their welfare benifits.

Anonymous said...

That's not entirely true. The OC police force is huge, so is the lifeguard crew. They are all American. Most servers at reputable restraunts are American students. Bus drivers, water sports equipment rental, city maintenance and more. Its low skilled jobs that Americans are leaving, and I will agree with you on those. Why work for a couple hundred a week if youre on the system. It comes out of your benefits so you are essentially working for free, or worse yet it's costing you money to get to work. That's a no brainer!

Anonymous said...

11:10 and 11:28 are full of it..There are locals that want to work but bringing in these foreign kids drives the wages in the area down so it's not worth working in OC unless you want to live in a two bedroom condo with 12-14 other people. American kids should not have to compete with cheap, foreign labor..Period. How would you feel if your local government dumped several thousand low wage people into your job market??

Anonymous said...

11:43--
Exactly! No one here gets a chance at the jobs, yet some employers can afford to house them, something not offered if you are a US citizen. Gimme a break w/this feel-good article; help your own!!

Anonymous said...

Well I just love these comments. I am an Ocean City Employer. If you want to work and you are local, we will interview you for a possible job. Indeed, we prefer to hire locally. We hire J1 students because we cannot fill all the positions to staff our business. Let me please address some of the idiotic comments that are written here. First, our foreign workers almost always prove to be good workers, dedicated and intelligent. Half of them do not just disappear. In fact, in our case, more than half will come back to us for the three years they are eligible to do so and then go on to graduate from their universities and take a responsible place in their countries. Contrary to the totally uninformed comment about pay, we pay our J1 workers the same amount, including overtime, that local workers get. There is not a different scale nor are there tax breaks to hire them. Standard labor laws apply to everyone. We sign a contract with our employment service that guarantees their wage and the amount of hours that we expect them to work per week. Any business that recruits foreign workers from a reputable recruiting firm does the same. Our J1 workers are important to us and we want them to have a positive experience with us and in the US. We believe they do.

Anonymous said...

There are good American kids working too.
The foreign students that come are are for the most part intelligent,university students, bilingual and hard workers. Those few that eventually become citizens are valuable additions to our work force and our country.

I enjoy working with good American and foreign youth. They are the future.

Anonymous said...

One of the reasons I quit going. Russian mob has to many prostitutes and drunken foreigners. Now cant even smoke a butt after fifteen minutes off trying to communicate with them.

Anonymous said...

12:05 I am an employer in OC as well, and I can attest to the fact that foreign worker do drive down wages or, at the very least, keep wages depressed. I came to OC 20 years ago. At that time I had dozens of American kids looking for work. Not so much any longer because of the conditions that some of these J1 students will live in. Americans kids are not accustomed to living with 12-14 people, in a crappy little living space as was stated above. Wages have remained pretty must stagnant over the past 20 years due to the unintended consequences associated with bringing in cheap labor. We are over run with mainly Russian students who do in fact overstay their visas..If you state differently, you have your head up your......And you may pay equally, but that pay is probably pretty much what it was in the 90's...Wages in OC have not kept up with inflation..That's been a fact since the 80's.It's not that Americans don't want the jobs; they just can't justify the sky high rent, pest infested living quarters, and travel time to get to OC for low pay..

Anonymous said...

hope O.C. is not hiring muslims.

Anonymous said...

Yes they are!! It is beneath them to have to work!!!

Anonymous said...


Sorry other employer. Our base pay is 10 per hour. Above minimum wage by two dollars. I am sure there are businesses out there that pay under minimum and perhaps you are one of them. Do not know. But I blame the employer for that. Not the employee. i hope you have a successful year.

Anonymous said...

We better take good care of them anyway. Or Putin will invade to "protect" them.

Anonymous said...

The U.S. Government should wait until March then cancel this program to Russians for the involvement in the Ukraine invasion.
But, Obama is a Communist so don't get your hopes up.

Anonymous said...

You are not in any way involved with employing anyone. Our students are contracted through United W&T and lowest wage is $9.50 that they will even contract them at. Another fool that knows nothing because he's sitting on his mothers couch eating cheetos.

Anonymous said...

American kids are LAZY. Sorry call it like it is. We have created a bunch of "Me" kids. It suks