Most Aprils, 360 Mexicans like Ricardo Ruiz Padilla arrive at Delaware Park to groom and hotwalk the 1,400 horses stabled at the track during the spring and summer race season.
They are legal guest workers on temporary visas who pay taxes, contribute to Social Security, and return home at the end of the season. By law, they must be paid prevailing wages.
But this year, most won't be back. Neither will thousands of foreign gardeners, resort waiters, fence installers and hotel housekeepers.
The last of the year's supply of visas - 33,000 out of 66,000 permitted by law - were snapped up Jan. 2, the day they became available but before workers who would arrive in the spring were allowed to apply.
Measures to expand the program, which brought 122,541 workers into the country in 2006, got run over by the frenzy to pass an omnibus spending bill before Congress recessed last month.
"I don't know what is going to happen," said Bessie Gruwell, executive director of the Delaware Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association.
She is not the only one who is worried.
All across the country, landscapers, resort owners and golf course operators are lobbying desperately to get Congress to lift the limit on the number of seasonal guest-worker visas issued this year.
In West Chester, the operator of a formalwear rental business wonders who will iron tuxedo shirts during prom season. He will have to do without 50 workers who would have come from Mexico from April through July.
Ken Pagurek planned to spend $200,000 for new trucks and mowers to expand his $2 million landscaping business, HPK Property Maintenance, in Montgomery County. But without his 25 workers, known as H-2B laborers, from Mexico, the equipment is on hold. Pagurek figures he will work a weed whacker himself.
"Now we're trying to put ourselves in survival mode," he said.
Trade associations are pushing a bill whose name sounds like a business version of Mom and Apple Pie - the Save our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act.
Legalized seasonal foreign labor is a win-win situation, they say. Business owners need help. They cannot find it here. The foreign workers want the opportunity. The businesses grow, feeding the economy. Where's the harm?
"This is the legal way to do it," said Michael Glah, president of IPR International Personnel Resources Inc., a West Chester labor recruiter with an office in Mexico City. Without the visas, "you are essentially pushing people into the undocumented labor force."
