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H-2A employer says lifting the travel ban for South Africa will have little impact
The Biden Administration is lifting travel restrictions for nearly 7,000 seasonal foreign workers coming from South Africa because of the spread of the omicron variant in the U.S.
Ryan Haffner is with U.S. Custom Harvesters Inc. and uses the H-2A visa program for his operation in Kansas. “We’ve been going through this multiple times now since the beginning of the pandemic. It seems like in a roundabout way we’ve built a program for working around this for South Africa and some other countries but mostly South Africa,” Haffner says.
The Biden administration imposed the travel ban in November but announced December 24 it would remove the ban. The majority of the workers arrive in the U.S. in February, March and April.
Haffner tells Brownfield his operation hasn’t been impacted by the restriction because his employees don’t return to the U.S. until late spring….