Maine
Maine businesses say H-1B visas are critical to filling labor gaps
Idexx, which is headquartered in Westbrook, is one of the Maine companies with the most H-1B visa approvals. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald
An ongoing clash between Republicans over visas for highly skilled immigrants is bringing new attention to the program, which Maine business and immigration experts say is vital to filling jobs in some of the state’s fastest-growing industries amid a tight labor market.
The visas, known as H-1B visas, allow 65,000 skilled workers to come to the U.S. each year to fill specialized jobs that require at least a bachelor’s degree, often in technology, health care, higher education, scientific research or other STEM fields.
Nationally, tech giants like Tesla, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple use H-1B visas to source thousands of higher-level employees. Locally, they’re favored by companies like The Jackson Laboratory, Eastern Maine Medical Center, the University of Maine, Idexx and Wex.
The program made headlines last week after Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who’ve been tapped to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, defended the visas and the need to bring “the best and the brightest” into the United States. Musk, who grew up in South Africa and is now the richest man in the world, wrote on X, the social media platform that he owns, that H-1B visas are the reason he and many other immigrants have found success living and working in the U.S. He said he was prepared to “go to war on this issue.”
But anti-immigration Republicans have criticized the program as a way to take well-paying jobs away from Americans and hand them to foreign workers for less money. The H-1B visas have also been criticized by progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who argued that companies abuse the program. He likened the visa recipients to “low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”
President-elect Donald Trump has historically opposed the H-1B visa program, believing companies should prioritize American labor over hiring foreign workers. In 2020, he restricted several forms of legal immigration, including access to H-1B and H-2B visas, which are used for jobs in fields like hospitality and construction.
But last week Trump appeared to change course and defended the program, siding with Musk, saying the country “needs smart people.”
‘HARDER TO MEET STAFFING’
The apparent shift is welcome news to many companies — including dozens in Maine — that rely on the program.
Eastern Maine Medical Center and The Jackson Laboratory are consistently the top two Maine entities to request H-1B workers. In 2024, the laboratory requested 37 visas and the hospital requested 34. In 2023, they requested 51 and 45 visas, respectively.
Eastern Maine Medical Center has roughly 120 H-1B employees at a given time, said Paul Bolin, executive vice president and chief people and administrative officer for Northern Light Health, the hospital’s parent company.
“Things have gotten worse since the pandemic,” Bolin said.
The state isn’t producing enough nurses to meet the need, so the hospital is still reliant on traveling and international nurses and medical staff.
“If those are further restricted, it would make it that much harder to meet our staffing needs,” he said.
Sarah Joughin, senior associate director of the Office of International Programs at the University of Maine, said the program is vital to both the university and the broader University of Maine System. In 2024, the university system was approved for 30 H-1B visas, 24 of which were for positions at the flagship campus in Orono.
According to Joughin, the program “enables our institutions to attract and retain highly skilled professionals from around the world, ensuring access to a global talent pool essential for advancing research, innovation, and academic excellence. This is particularly critical in specialized fields where domestic expertise may be limited, such as engineering, computer science, and advanced research disciplines,” she said, adding that the national shortage of qualified STEM professionals has made it difficult to recruit U.S. citizens for more specialized roles.
In an emailed statement, the Jackson Lab also reinforced the importance of the program.
“JAX — and the U.S. scientific community at large — depends on the H-1B visa program to foster international collaboration and drive groundbreaking research. The diverse expertise and innovative perspectives the international community contributes are crucial to advancing our mission to improve human health,” it said.
SMALL BUT MIGHTY
On top of the 65,000 yearly cap, an additional 20,000 visas are available to workers who have received an advanced degree in the U.S.
Universities, nonprofits affiliated with universities and nonprofit or government research organizations are exempt from the cap. The visas are good for three years and can be extended to six.
The specialized work visas are different from H-2B visas — the temporary work authorizations that many of Maine’s seasonal and tourism-based businesses rely on each year.
H-2B visas are issued when there are not enough U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to do temporary work, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Business owners have to prove that they tried to hire in the U.S. and that hiring foreign workers will not adversely impact the wages or working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
H-1B visas, however, do not require proof that the business owner tried to recruit within the U.S.
Like the H-1B visas, there is a 66,000 cap, but the Department of Homeland Security frequently releases more. In November, the federal government announced an additional 65,000 H-2B visas.
It was welcome news to Maine’s seasonal businesses, which last year were approved for just shy of 2,000 H-2B workers.
Comparatively, Maine employers last year were approved for 320 H-1B workers — 148 new positions and 172 extensions.
Patrick Woodcock, president and CEO of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, warned against discounting the program as less important for its size.
Patrick Woodcock
“It is some of the fastest growing companies in the state that are utilizing it,” he said. “The program has been modest in numbers, but I think in terms of economic output for the state, they really have been pretty consequential.”
H-2B visas are critically important, especially in the increasingly tight labor market of the last few years, but the need for H-1B visas will likely only increase as the state tries to combat an aging population and declining workforce participation.
The number of H-1B new or extended workers in Maine has been increasing over the last decade, with a low of 217 in 2015 and a high of 342 in 2022. It was not immediately clear how many total workers are in the state at a given time because people in the second or third year of a visa are not counted in yearly totals.
“This is an incredibly important program to supplement our existing workforce … and it is critical to maintain some of the progress we’ve seen economically in recent years,” Woodcock said.
AN EMPLOYMENT ‘WORKHORSE’
Many people now on or seeking an H-1B visa came to the U.S. through a different visa program for school, and one to three years after graduation need an employer to sponsor a special skills visa to stay, said Stefanie Trice Gill, founder and chief recruiter of IntWork, a Maine recruiting firm that specializes in pairing immigrants with employers.
“Often they’re with people who’ve been working with them for some time, and the employers just can’t afford to let them go,” Trice Gill said. “It’s much better for employers to be able to bring someone to their tech company in Maine than to have to leave Maine to find workers.”
Trice Gill said she does not work with many H-1B visa holders, though the agency is interested in doing so — the immigrants who go through IntWork are often already living in Maine and already have work permits. They don’t need sponsorship.
“But even with that supply, employers still struggle to fill key positions,” she said.
According to Trice Gill, immigrants are more likely to have a master’s degree in a STEM field than a U.S.-born candidate, she said.
“For those professions that require an advanced degree, we can’t meet the need without considering immigrant candidates,” she said. “As the U.S. industry grows, the workforce has been declining. Even with all the effort to get U.S. citizens to study STEM professions, there’s still a big shortage of skilled STEM professionals.”
Marcus Jaynes, an immigration attorney with Landis, Arn and Jaynes in Westbrook, called H-1B visas the “workhorse of temporary employment” for professional positions.
The 65,000 to 85,000 cap is barely touching the demand.
“Last year there were half a million registrations in the annual lottery,” said Jaynes, who specializes in business and employment-related immigration law. “That’s a really high contrast. It shows very clearly that employers are looking to bring on a lot more H-1B workers than they can.”
The cap is already too low, so further limiting the number would be challenging, Jaynes said.
“If the program sees restrictions, it’s going to hurt the individual companies that can’t access the program, but it’s also going to hurt the economy,” he said.
Jaynes is encouraged by Trump’s recent statements favoring the program but said there’s still “a lot of room for damage to be done” by restricting the program through other means than the cap, like raising the minimum prevailing wages to make them less accessible to smaller companies.
“There’s lots of speculation about what may happen,” he said.
Erin Evans is a Portland-based master beekeeper and small business owner, She previously served as director of finance and administration at Maine Audubon and as CFO/COO of Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.
Honey bees are Maine’s official state insect and a keystone species in our ecosystem. Like tiny flying dustmops, they sample their surroundings, collecting pollen, nectar and contaminants that reveal what’s in our soil, our water and our air.
As a local beekeeper measuring PFAS in my own hives, I stand with the Maine farmers,
families and advocates on the front lines of this issue, and it’s why I support Dr. Nirav Shah as our next governor.
The Rutgers-New Brunswick Eagleton Institute of Politics recently shared a 2025 database on scientists, engineers and healthcare professionals leading our nation in state legislatures. Out of more than 7,000 lawmakers, there are just over 200 legislators who are also scientists, engineers or healthcare professionals.
While Maine was among the highest representation, with 11 members, I can’t help but wonder how different our response will be to present and emerging environmental crises if we have someone trained in both law and scientific thinking as our next governor.
As a public health leader, who’s already guided us through a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, Dr. Shah understands that PFAS isn’t just “out there.” It’s in our soil, food, water and in our bodies and will have a public health impact for generations. Best of all, he’s already been doing the work.
During his time as director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Shah recognized how widespread PFAS contamination is in Maine’s soil and water. Now, at a time when science-informed leadership is more essential than ever, he’s made PFAS protection a top priority.
Maine has made real strides in addressing forever chemicals by becoming the first state to launch an emergency relief fund, ban sludge-based fertilizers loaded with PFAS and create a permanent PFAS response program. We’ve also tested hundreds of sites, identified 34 high-priority towns and awarded $3.5 million in grants for research.
But even with this progress, the real challenge is how Maine deals with problems that last longer than any one administration.
It’s time we see PFAS and other environmental contamination crises not as political hot potatoes but as persistent issues affecting ecosystems across all of Maine. Do we continue to follow the status quo where politically entrenched candidates, beholden to the legacies of prior leaders and corporate interests, dictate the response? Or do we choose science and a leader familiar with critical outside-the-box thinking? Who should sit at that table as we create policies and laws to study, analyze, manage and reduce the threat of harmful chemicals to Mainers and the environment we all love?
In her recently released book “Inescapable: Facing Up to Forever Chemicals,” journalist F. Marina Schauffler reminds us that Maine’s taxpayers have already paid hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to PFAS contamination, and we’re nowhere near done.
PFAS chemicals will stay around for a long time, and so will the government systems that we set up to respond to these crises. Dr. Shah’s background in law and public health, especially in responding to exposure risks, makes him the leader we need in the Blaine House.
Most of all, he knows that in Maine and across the nation, climate change, water safety, soil health and human health are all interconnected, and part of the same sets of challenges. Our solutions will need to be well planned and well coordinated. Just ask the bees.
WATERVILLE, Maine (WABI) – Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME, traveled to Waterville Monday to tour the Mid-Maine Technical Center.
At MMTC, high school students from four districts get hands-on experience in job-focused classrooms across 15 different programs.
Collins toured several of those programs, including nursing, media, and culinary arts.
She highlighted the more than seven hundred thousand dollars she secured in federal funding in 2024 for machine tooling and 3D printing equipment.
Also adding the importance of schools like this to not only fill critical workforce gaps, but do so right here in the state.
“Programs like this help encourage students to stay in the state of Maine once they’ve finished their education,” answered Collins. “It gives them a real boost if they’re going on to higher education, but it also equips them with the skills that they need if they’re going directly into the workforce.”
Collins also mentioned cooperative agreements in some programs that allow students to start earning college credit. Many students she spoke with also spend part of the week working for local businesses in their field.
Copyright 2026 WABI. All rights reserved.
They were built decades ago in some of the most picturesque spots across Maine — manmade mountains of granite and brick, concrete and steel, rising beside rivers that powered the state’s booming textile industry through the 1800s and 1900s.
Now, these old mills are increasingly being converted to housing and other purposes. In Biddeford’s sprawling mill district, a variety of housing projects have been completed or are underway, including 154 apartments in the former Pepperell Mill that are being leased or sold as condominiums.
Two of the most recent conversions are Picker House Lofts, a mixed-income rental property in Lewiston, and The Spinning Mill, a housing and commercial project in Skowhegan. Both opened last year.
The Spinning Mill, including 41 apartments, a boutique hotel and a restaurant, received a 2026 Honor Award from Maine Preservation for excellence in historic preservation and rehabilitation.
Here’s a look at those three mill conversions.
The Spinning Mill
Location: Skowhegan, Somerset County
Waterfront: Kennebec River
Year built: 1922
Year renovated: 2025
Number of units: 41
Monthly rent: $1,510-2,750, utility and amenity fees vary
In its peak years, the Maine Spinning Co. employed 300 people and produced 2 million pounds of wool yarn annually in the heart of the downtown district, closing in 2005. High Tide Capital of Bangor purchased the site in 2019 and began a $20 million residential and commercial redevelopment project.
The conversion suffered a major setback in December 2023, when the storm-churned Kennebec fooded the first floor, causing more than $3 million in damage. An economic recovery grant from the state helped the developers clean up and continue.
The adaptive reuse respected the building’s history, preserving wooden floors and high ceilings, oversized windows and exposed brick walls. Modern plumbing, electrical, heating and cooling systems were installed, along with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops.
The four-story building includes studio through three-bedroom units, ranging from 630 to 1,300 square feet. Amenities include a fitness center, mini movie theater, coworking space, resident lounge and art studio. The property also includes The Skowhegan, a 20-room boutique hotel, and the Biergarten, a German-themed restaurant and event space with riverside patio.
Contact: Yates Murphy, The Spinning Mill, 207-951-6475
Picker House Lofts
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Location: Lewiston, Androscoggin County
Waterfront: Androscoggin River
Year built: 1855
Year renovated: 2025
Number of units: 72
Monthly rent: $1,495-2,000 (26 market-rate units); $801-1,332 (46 subsidized); heat, hot water and basic Wi-Fi included
Part of the 7-acre Continental Mill complex, Picker House Lofts is a 79,000-square-foot, mixed-income rental property developed by The Szanton Co. of Portland. The remaining 481,000 square feet of former factory space is being developed to include more than 300 additional apartments along with office, retail and light industrial uses by Chinburg Properties of Newmarket, New Hampshire.
Named for its original function, the five-story building is where workers called “pickers” removed seeds, twigs and other debris from raw cotton before it was woven into cloth.
It includes one-, two- and three-bedroom units, with 46 reserved for households with incomes at or below 60% of the area median income, which ranges from $35,880 for a single person to $51,240 for four people, according to MaineHousing.
The developers preserved historic features where possible, including wood floors, huge operable windows and 13-foot ceilings with exposed overhead carrying beams, while adding modern fixtures, utilities and appliances.
Amenities include a fitness center, indoor bike storage, landscaped courtyard with picnic tables and a communal lounge with adjoining roof deck that overlooks the Androscoggin River. It’s located downtown near a farmers market, museums and a park with a fitness court.
Contact: Saco Falls Management, 207-228-8800
Pepperell Mill
Location: Biddeford, York County
Waterfront: Saco River
Year built: 1845
Year renovated: 2008
Number of units: 154
Monthly rent: $1,695-2,995, utilities and wifi included
Originally converted by local developer Doug Sanford, apartments in the Pepperell Mill Campus retain many historic features from its textile-weaving past, including 10- to 18-foot ceilings, exposed brick walls and beams, and honey-colored maple floors.
Now owned and managed by Texas-based Presidium, the property is available to lease or purchase residential units as they come on the market, providing what the company calls a “try before you buy” opportunity. It’s part of a 17-acre complex in the heart of a downtown that includes a variety of small businesses, artists, restaurants, breweries and coffee shops.
Apartments range from economical studios to luxury two-bedroom, two-bathroom units that include washer-dryer hookups. Available condos are priced from $325,000 to $1.5 million, according to Portside Real Estate Group.
Units feature modern finishes and oversized, industrial-style windows, many with views of the Saco River. Amenities include smart laundry facilities, green spaces with seating areas and gas grills, riverside picnic areas and a dog-washing station.
Contact: Pepperell Mill Campus, 207-282-5577, Ext. 201
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