SALT LAKE CITY — Tyler Holt summed up the problem his Utah landscaping business faces every year. “People who want to be in the job force want stability — if they want to work, they work full time,” he said. “Locally there’s just no workers who want to do anything seasonal.”

The complaint has been echoed not only by landscapers in Utah, but also by amusement parks in Wyoming, restaurants in Rhode Island, crab trappers in Maryland, camps in Colorado and thousands of other businesses around the country that depend on seasonal workers from abroad to work lower-wage nonfarm jobs.

The scramble for these temporary guest workers has been intense in recent years, as the jobless rate inched down and tensions over immigration policy ratcheted up. But this year, after the coronavirus pandemic first halted and then seriously constrained the stream of foreign workers into the United States, the competition has been particularly fierce.

The Biden administration responded to frantic pleas from small businesses in the spring. It did not renew a pandemic-related suspension of the J-1 program, which provides short-term visas designed for foreign students who come to the U.S.to work and travel. Soon after, it raised the quota on temporary visas under the H-2B program for temporary nonagricultural workers, which are issued through a lottery.

But travel restrictions, backlogs and delays at foreign consulates in approving applicants have still left businesses from Maine to California in the lurch.

Holt, the chief executive of Golden Landscaping and Lawn in Orem, asked for 60 H-2B workers, hoping the team could be in place by April 1, when the season began. He struck out in the initial lottery, but he was luckier the second time around, when the administration increased the quota by one-third.

On July 9, Holt was overjoyed to hear that his application had been approved. But now, roughly halfway through his eight-month season, still no workers have arrived.

“Nothing,” he said with disgust when asked two weeks later about an update.

Holt said he had raised his normal $14-an-hour wage — by $2, then $3, then $4 and then $5 — to attract local workers. “I will give anybody a job that wants to work,” he said. The crews he has in place are working 60 to 70 hours a week to keep up with the demand.

Small resort towns often depend on international seasonal workers because their population isn’t sufficient to fill all of the suddenly available slots at hotels, restaurants, ice cream shops or ski slopes that serve the hordes of tourists who appear and then vanish.

“We just don’t have enough local workers to be able to support the economy as it needs to be in the summertime,” said Jen Hayes, who is the J-1 visa program liaison for Old Orchard Beach, a coastal town south of Portland, Maine.

Historically, the town has had anywhere from 650 to 740 international student workers in the summer — from countries including Turkey, Romania and Russia — but Hayes estimated that there were only 125 to 150 as of late July.

The labor shortage has forced some businesses to limit their hours or close for an extra day a week.