The "big" town near me has a summer festival that, among other things has a ride vendor with typical fair/carnival rides.

Typically the ride provider uses H2B visas to staff their rides and food trailers.  My understanding is that they used Eastern European employees at one point, but for the last 10 years or so, has used mexican nationals.   I can say that I've never heard anything bad about the Mexican employees, and they were here legally under H2bs so this NOT a illegal immigrant/Mexicans are bad thread at all.

But...this year, H2b visas have been significantly restricted, causing a significant disruption, and they had, as far as I could tell, and entirely U.S. citizen workforce, supplemented by hiring local high school kids. 

I'm sure that sucked for the ride company, in that having to find,  interview, background check, etc, a bunch of U.S. employees was unexpected.  But, several of my friend's kids got jobs for the week, and everything seems to be going smoothly.

I know, its a single instance, but it seems like the restrictions on H2b visas this year is a good thing.  Thoughts?

Around here that means they get to detassel corn.  That should grind the snowflake right out of most of them.

I'm pretty sure that having a shitty summer job is good for you.

I had to cut the flowers off a big field of garlic with a weedwacker when I was 14 or so.  I couldn't stand the smell of garlic for years after that, but I remembered that experence a couple times in college getting up at 6AM to study for 8AM classes.

I did that one summer and earned enough to buy a dirtbike. I think all kids need to have an experience
like that.

From what I've seen a bunch of companies have just plain forgotten how or where to recruit people for manual labor. I read them complaining about Americans not wanting to work, well no shit if you just put an ad at the local unemployment agency for your brutal field job then you might not get applicants. A lot of these jobs are seasonal and used to be done by teens. One benefit of hiring illegals is that if you find and hire one they'll go and tell the others that they house with, so it make finding a workforce easy. They got complacent and disconnected and are either going to have to relearn basic stuff, or more likely they'll start lobbying the government to bring in more illegals.

Kansas farmers tell Trump that they “need more Mexicans” https://t.co/lIX6FVEs99 pic.twitter.com/HX2gGES5mc

Businessweek  (@BW) June 20, 2017

I'd argue that in a year or two, the market will adjust to not having the H2Bs in the previously expected quantity, and wages will have to go up a little, in combination with recruiting over a broader area, etc.

There are college students that work for organic farmers for nothing right now.  If you figured out how to spin it right, handle their logistics, and pay them better than minimum wage, I'd imagine you could recruit more.