My son owns a landscaping company.
Minimum wage here is $8.25 per hour. McDonald’s pays $8.47. Box stores and warehouses pay $11 to $13 per hour. He pays $15 per hour.
He cannot find anyone willing to work. All the landscaping companies in this area are having the same problem.
If the choice is between raising wages and importing 3rd worlders then he either does the former or goes out of business. He needs to do something else. I have absolutely no sympathy at all for "small business". Not all but most are greedy a$$holes. I know because I worked for many of them while going to college ages ago.
If your business model relies on illegal or imported h-2b visa then I wish you all the worst life can offer. May your crops rot in the field, your restaurant shutter its doors, and your landscaping company go out of business.
I imagine your son wants his employees to walk around with those ear-numbing gas leaf blowers all day. That’s as bad as riding around on the back of a garbage truck and, short of illegals who are heavily subsidized by American taxpayers, would be what they’d earn.
Which just might inspire landscapers to switch to electric, despite some inconveniences—which would be much better on all the ears in your son’s customers’ neighborhoods.
Nothing more obnoxious than the modern “landscaping” business—and cheap-labor illegals have driven the business down to that.