Can the Jersey Shore Survive a Pandemic Summer Without Overseas Workers?
A lack of Summer Work Travel participants could be a major blow to beach town economies
Stitched together by lacy causeways and humpbacked bridges, the islands along the southern coast of New Jersey tend to be bubbles hardened over generations of summer migration — same faces, same places, year after year. Going down the Shore can be a healing tonic, one many are extra-thirsty for following months of anxiety and uncertainty surrounding Covid-19. But visitors may find a different place waiting for them at their exit off the last 30 miles of the Garden State Parkway this summer because the novel coronavirus has imperiled the Summer Work Travel Program, the reliable source of labor that keeps the Shore’s economy turning.
The SWT program started in 1961 as a division of the State Department’s J-1 visa and brings tens of thousands of overseas college students into the country each year. The students fill seasonal jobs, with a period of free time at the end of the summer built in for traveling around the U.S. Many different countries participate, but as the Jersey Shore goes, students mostly travel from Balkan and former Soviet nations. The J-1s are so woven into the fabric of the Shore community that it would be more surprising to hear “Rainbow…
