DOOR CO, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – On summer weekends, Door County can expect thousands of visitors.
Typically J-1 Visa college students come from other countries to work and help businesses during the summer. But several factors slowed down the work travel program.
The pandemic and national worker shortage are still obstacles for businesses.
“I mean we can’t get dishwashers, we can’t get bussers, we can’t get people to host, I can’t get food runners. So these guys come in and they want to be in America, they want to learn our culture,” said Owner of Kitty O’Reillys, Amy Crook.
Crook says having J-1 Visa students is vital to business operations. This summer she’ll have 12 on staff.
She tells FOX 11 J-1 Visa students have kept them open seven days a week again.
“We did get to the point where we had to close on Mondays for a little while because we were so short staffed.”
“When we didn’t have the J-1 students here we saw a lot of our really key businesses having to close for one or two days during our peak season,” said Destination Door County Director of Advocacy, Phil Berndt.
Berndt says now they have the J-1 Visa students to fill in the gaps again.
In 2020 there were only 58 summer workers and 166 last year.
Now, a total of 497 will be back, which is close to pre-pandemic numbers.
“Each of them really amount to about 1,000 individual jobs, seasonal jobs that are covered by them being here,” said Berndt.
Which helps Crook and 44 other host employers run operations. It also helps students like Kari Osorio get an opportunity to leave Columbia, earn money and master English in Door County.
“Oh yeah for sure this is a great experience for us,” said Osorio.
So far Door County has welcomed 333 J-1’s and is anticipating 164 more.
Students will come from countries like Albania, Ecuador and Mongolia.
