Exchange visitors have returned to work at the Jersey Shore at pre-pandemic levels

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Yordan Yordanov is spending his second summer in a row in New Jersey.“It will remain my second home for life,” he said. “Even though I’ve been here…overall, six months.”

Yordanov is from Bulgaria and has always wanted to see what life is like in America. He is in the United States on a J-1 visa, which allows overseas residents to enter the country on a work-study visitor exchange. He is one of 25 overseas students working at Playland’s Castaway Cove in Ocean City, New Jersey, this summer.

The boardwalk attraction employs 300 people overall during the summer tourist season. On any given year, Playland employs between 20-25 exchange visitors, according to Brian Hartley, vice president of the boardwalk attraction.

“We pretty much try to just keep it to that,” he said. “This way we can really make sure that they’re taken care of.”

Though COVID is still a pandemic, according to the World Health Organization, Hartley hopes life does not return to the early days of the public health emergency.

“We had a lot of kids who were afraid, parents were afraid for the kids to get a job, especially here,” he recalled, “you’re collecting tickets from people, you’re kind of touching them, people are sitting in seats, and someone else is sitting in it. We were going around washing them between every ride.

Playland also didn’t receive any overseas help in 2020.

The federal government under the Trump Administration suspended J-1 visas as it tried to limit the spread of COVID, according to the American Immigration Council.  Restrictions were eased the following year under the Biden Administration. However, there was a backlog in American embassies overseas.

Hartley said things have slowly returned to pre-pandemic levels.

“In 2021, I think we only have four or five [students,]” he said. Then it was a slow start getting going in 2022. A lot of the embassies were still closed for a while. But everyone now is really back into the full swing of things.”

A State Department spokesperson said that substantial improvements were made last year in reducing wait times across all visa categories.

For the last couple of years, the Alliance for International Exchange reported that more than 4,900 overseas students came to the U.S. for a summer work travel program.

Lisa Murray, director of the exchange program at the American Immigration Council, said she is also seeing a return to pre-pandemic activity in exchange programs.

“It’s taken us a few years to kind of get back up to our pre-COVID numbers. I would say that we are definitely there now.”