One good thing about this being an election year: There is at least a glimmer of hope that some long-standing worker and workforce issues may finally get some attention. A case in point: more visas for foreign workers.

It should be no big surprise to anyone that the United States has some very specific areas where there are worker shortages—like nurses and engineers—because the U.S. is not turning out enough native-born workers with skills in these areas. This is the classic H-1B visa problem that Microsoft’s Bill Gates has spent so much time talking about  and that Congress seems so unwilling to deal with. Current rules only allow 66,000 H-1B visas per year, and as Gates rightfully points out, that number is woefully inadequate.

But there is another worker shortage problem that faces us today as we head into the summer season: a shortage of seasonal workers for all those summer restaurant and resort jobs that need to get filled right away. A story this week in the Los Angeles Times details how the Labor Department “is rewriting rules to help employers find and hire workers for temporary jobs as landscapers, waitresses and crab pickers more quickly and efficiently than current guidelines allow.” 

Here’s the key to this, according to the Times story: a fairly dramatic change in what constitutes a temporary worker. “In one major change affecting industries such as construction and shipyards, the definition of ‘temporary’ will be drastically expanded—from the current 10 months to three years. Adjusting the so-called H-2B visa program is part of an ongoing administration effort to reconfigure immigration laws on a piecemeal basis in the absence of a comprehensive overhaul.”

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao told the Times that the changes in the H-2B program would cut down bureaucratic delays. “Use of the program has increased in recent years, but duplicative requirements have … [meant] employers have failed to get workers in a timely fashion,” she said in the Times’ story. Chao added that the new rules also are meant to protect American workers. “Foreign workers will have to reapply annually and labor markets will be tested yearly to ensure there are no able and available U.S. workers for the jobs, Chao explained,” the paper reported.

Of course, there are critics of the Bush administration’s new policy toward H-2B visas.

 “The administration is trying in the only way it can to respond to business pressure,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He argued that if employers paid high enough wages, Americans would take these jobs. “Why do we even have such a program?” Krikorian asked. “Employers are never satisfied with how cheap labor is.”

Krikorian’s argument is old and tired. There have always been low-wage jobs—I had quite a few when I was in high school and college. But those jobs aren’t all that attractive to a broad cross section of the American-born workforce. That job I had at McDonald’s in high school? Today here in Southern California, it is likely to be filled by a middle-aged Latino from Mexico instead of an Anglo-American high school student. And you can’t raise the wages high enough to solve the problem and widen the worker pool without hurting the profitability of the business.

More flexibility for temporary worker visas is certainly a big help, but this is really just a stopgap solution. What we need is a comprehensive immigration policy that deals with the realities of today’s American economy. The Bush administration failed to address the issue when it had the clout to get something done, and now, with just 242 lame-duck days left, it doesn’t have the clout anymore.

So this is clearly an issue for a new president and Congress to tackle. It is on the agenda of Clinton, McCain and Obama, but the question is, how important do any of them really think it is? Out here in California, immigration and the impact on the workforce is a really big deal, as I am sure it is in much of America. We need to press our presidential candidates to see it as a big deal too.