Endless Summer: Foreign Lifeguards Can’t Get Home

Today’s Washington Post has a horror story about how the apparent collapse of Century Pool Management, a swimming pool management firm in Gaithersburg, left a lot of young foreign lifeguards stranded in the U.S.

City Paper wrote about that same company’s reliance on labor from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the pool season.

At the time, Century and others in the recreation realm were complaining that changes in work visa regulations would keep tens of thousands of experienced lifeguards out of the U.S. this year. Only foreign students were still able to take the seasonal work legally this summer, while veteran first responders, who used to get into the U.S. using H-2B visas, were shut out when those visas were all-but eliminated amid the anti-immigration mania on Capitol Hill.

Century’s foreign lifeguards are quoted in the Post piece that Century stopped paying them before summer’s end, and now the company has shut its offices leaving the imported laborers unable to afford the trips home.

Welcome to America!