'Who will do the work?' Trump's migrant crackdown threatens racing's future

When it comes to its workforce, American horse racing could be galloping towards a crisis.

A visa program that serves the racing industry poorly plus a dearth of US employees willing to do the sport’s grunt work – the grooming, the exercise-riding and the hot-walking of racehorses – has long left racing heavily reliant upon undocumented workers from Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America.

But now, the recent spate of raids by immigration agents and threats to pull federal funding to sanctuary cities has many US racetracks and horse-farms rattled.

“When you let something go on this long, all of a sudden it just blows up. And when something blows up, there’s going to be some collateral damage of some very good, hard-working people who shouldn’t be caught in this trap at all,” said Mike Campbell, a trainer and owner, and president of the Illinois Thoroughbred Horseman’s Association.

“At the tracks, people are terrified,” said Will Velie, an Oklahoma-based immigration attorney, whose clients includes many trainers and what are known as backstretch workers. The problem is, the recent immigration crackdown – Trump’s executive order makes clear that almost any migrant living illegally in America could be targeted – is likely to put the pinch on an industry already struggling to find qualified workers with papers.

Even if racehorse trainers want to hire documented workers only, or put existing undocumented workers on a path to citizenship, they have been tripped over by an immigration system riddled with obstacles. Undocumented migrants working in the US must return to their home country in order to gain work authorization. Once home, however, they can be barred from returning to the US for up to 10 years.

The H-2B visa – one of the few visas available to backstretch workers – is capped at 66,000 a year. The competition is fierce. For the first 33,000 H-2B visas issued in 2017, there were some 82,100 applications. And only a small number are ever issued to workers in the racing industry anyway.

What’s more, the H-2B “returning worker” exemption, which allowed existing H-2B holders to keep returning and working in the US on the same visa, ended last September. This exemption was especially important to the racing industry where trainers race year-round.

“It’s had an effect, for sure,” said Hall of Fame trainer Dale Romans. Romans is currently waiting for the green-light on 50 separate H-2B visa applications. “I had 77 employees last year, and when there’s all this uncertainty about whether you’re going to be able to maintain that labor force, you don’t know what to do.”

An H-2B visa isn’t the only avenue available to horsemen looking to work legally. The P1A is geared primarily towards professional athletes, such as jockeys, and a small retinue of helpers. The EB-3 visa is a petition for permanent residency, but is time-consuming and costly. Because of limited visa options, Romans thinks he might have to downscale if his current H-2B visa applications aren’t accepted.

“For me, I’ll have to close the doors. There’s no way I’ll work an illegal workforce, especially in the environment we have today. In a perfect world we’d have our own visa for the industry. [The H-2B] is not a perfect visa for what we do.”

The problem is exacerbated by a broader issue: Romans said that without foreign workers, it would be almost impossible to find Americans willing to do the labor-intensive work of grooms, riders and hotwalkers – unglamorous seven-days-a-week jobs with early starts and late finishes.

“And it’s not for want of trying to find them,” said George Crimarco, an immigration attorney in Florida, who currently represents 500 clients involved in the industry.

As part of the H-2B visa process, trainers must show that they have taken steps, like putting ads in papers, to fill the available job with American workers. But Crimarco said that in his 30 years as an immigration attorney, he has yet to find “one American” apply for a backstretch job.

He blames the industry for not using what political heft it has to have already enacted change in the immigration system to better suit the specialized needs of the industry.

“Horseracing is so fragmented,” Crimarco said. “There’s no unifying voice.”

According to Velie, undocumented workers who have provided false information to the I-9 work verification program, where employers decide whether work authorization documents “reasonably appear” to be genuine, could face deportation if tracks become the target of raids. “And that’s only the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

But should trainers be concerned about the clock being wound back a few decades to when racetrack raids were more commonplace, scooping up sometimes hundreds of undocumented workers in one swoop, and leaving trainers with inexperienced staff who didn’t “know how to handle a horse”?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson Dani Bennet wrote in an email that “no industry, regardless of size, type or location is exempt from complying with the law or being the subject of an HSI investigation.”

How would the agencies that govern racing in New York and California handle any increased focus by ICE on the industries in their states? The California Horse Racing Board defers to the Department of Immigration regarding its policies for working with local law enforcement agencies, a board spokesperson wrote.

Representatives from New York failed to respond to emailed questions.

There’s little doubt that Trump’s immigration crackdown has sent shockwaves through the sport. But among the people working behind the scenes, most reactions seem to swing between apprehension on one hand, and on the other, disbelief that horse racing will be the target of heightened scrutiny.

“The No1 call I’m getting is they want me to write them a power of attorney letter,” said Julio Rubio, an immigration adviser to the Horseman’s Benevolent and Protective Association, about the main concerns undocumented backstretch workers approach his office with. “In case they get deported, they want to leave their children with someone legal here.”

But Esvin, a groom at Santa Anita racetrack, who said that he has work authorization but asked that his surname not be used, dismisses fears of an immigration sweep of the track, even though he believes that as few as 10% of the grooms and hotwalkers there have papers.

“If they took everyone away, who would be left to do the work?” he said.

A common thread running through racing is a hope that Trump – a businessman who relies on migrant labor – will bring about the changes needed to reform the system in a way that will finally benefit the racing industry.

“If some people are just here to work, then fine,” Mike Campbell said. “But give them a work permit. Give them a pathway to be allowed to work here. And hold everybody accountable.”