Why So Many International Students Work on Martha's Vineyard: The J-1 and H-2B Summer Workforce Explained (2026)

Order a coffee in Oak Bluffs in July and the person who makes it may be a university student from Zagreb. The housekeeper at the inn is from Kingston, the kid scooping ice cream is from Belgrade, the woman running the register at the market has lived here twenty years and grew up in Minas Gerais. Visitors notice, and they ask us, sometimes carefully: why are there so many people from somewhere else working on an island in Massachusetts? The answer is arithmetic, and it is one of the most interesting things about the place. Here it is, with the numbers, so you understand who is serving your lunch and what their summer looks like.

The arithmetic

About 20,000 people live on Martha's Vineyard all year. In summer the population swells several times over; the Martha's Vineyard Times puts the visitor count at 100,000, and other estimates run higher. Every one of those visitors eats out, sleeps in a bed somebody made, buys ice cream and rents a bike, and the island's year-round workforce cannot stretch that far. Thousands of seasonal jobs open in May and close in September, and there is nowhere near enough local labour, or local housing, to fill them. So the island imports its summer staff, and has for decades. In 2025 that meant about 650 international students on J-1 visas, according to the Times, plus several hundred seasonal workers on H-2B visas, plus American college students, plus the year-round immigrant community that keeps the island running in every season.

Who the J-1 students are

The J-1 Summer Work Travel programme is run by the US State Department as a cultural exchange. Participants must be full-time university students in their home country, they can work in the United States for at most four months during their summer break, and they must go home before their own term starts. Sponsoring agencies arrange the job in advance, are required to make sure the pay meets federal and state minimum wage, must arrange suitable housing and transport, and must check in with each student every month. The rules ban the worst jobs: no overnight shifts between 10 pm and 6 am, no commission-only work, no domestic help, nothing in factories or construction. What remains is exactly what the island needs: restaurants, hotels, shops, ice cream counters, kitchens.

On the Vineyard they come mostly from Eastern Europe, and increasingly from the Balkans: the local papers list Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and Ghana among the home countries, alongside Jamaica. Most are 19 to 28. Several island businesses have relied on them for years; a fudge shop, a harbourside restaurant and a clothing chain all told the Vineyard Gazette that foreign students make up as much as half of their summer staff, and that some workers come back season after season. For a student from Croatia, where an average annual salary is around $17,000, a Vineyard summer at Massachusetts minimum wage plus tips can earn well over $10,000, which is why the programme has a waiting list.

Who the H-2B workers are

The second programme is H-2B, the seasonal non-agricultural work visa. It is not for students and it is not a cultural exchange: it brings adults, many of whom return to the same employer for years, for a season of work in hotels, restaurants, landscaping and housekeeping. On the Vineyard the H-2B workforce is heavily Jamaican, and the island received at least 138 H-2B workers in 2022 according to the Gazette, nearly all in hospitality. The programme has a national cap that Congress and the Department of Homeland Security adjust most years, which is why every spring the island papers carry a story about whether the summer's workers will be allowed in on time. When the cap is tight, restaurants open with shorter hours and hotels close floors; when it is loosened, as it was for 2023, the season runs smoother. Visitors see the effect without knowing the cause.

Where they live, and why it is the hard part

Ask any island business owner what limits them and the answer is not customers, it is beds. About 60 percent of the island's housing sits empty or is used less than two months a year, a one-bedroom rents for around $3,000 a month in season, and the Commission calculated in 2025 that a household earning $168,000 could not afford to buy a home here. Seasonal workers land in the middle of that. Employers rent dormitory-style houses, some hotels keep staff quarters, and a few large seasonal lodgings have housed eighty to a hundred students at a time in bunk rooms at more than $200 a week per person, arrangements that the town health inspectors and the Times have looked at closely and that have improved under pressure. A student's summer is often four to a room, a bike to work, and two jobs. The owner of a Vineyard Haven cafe told the Times that housing is the single biggest problem her business faces; the president of the Oak Bluffs business association put it as plainly: the island needs the staff and has insanely limited housing. That tension is the island's real summer story, and the students are living it.

The year-round community you are also meeting

Not everyone with an accent is here for the summer. Brazilians make up roughly a fifth of the island's year-round population, Portuguese is the island's second language, and about 40 percent of children in the public schools speak Portuguese at home, according to the county's health assessment and the Boston Globe. That community started arriving in the 1980s, first in landscaping and construction and housekeeping, and now owns restaurants, markets, bakeries and building firms across the island; both island newspapers translate their websites into Portuguese. The Brazilian bakery on Beach Road, the Caribbean grocer around the corner, the landscaping crew at the rental house: those are your neighbours for the week, not summer help, and our Vineyard Haven guide and grocery guide point to several of their businesses by name. The island's older Portuguese story is told every July at the Feast of the Holy Ghost.

What it means for your trip

• Mid-August is the turn. The J-1 students must be home before their universities start, so from about the second week of August the workforce thins while the visitors are still here. Slower service and shorter hours in late August are not rudeness; the staff has gone back to Sarajevo. Our after Labor Day guide explains what closes when.
• Tip properly, and in cash where you can. Massachusetts lets restaurants pay servers a base of $6.75 an hour with tips making up the rest. For a student working two jobs to bank a year's salary in twelve weeks, the tip is the wage. Twenty percent at a table, a dollar or two at a counter.
• Ask where they are from. That is the cultural exchange half of the programme, and most students are glad to be asked. You will learn more about Croatia in five minutes at a fudge counter than in a guidebook.
• Patience in July. A restaurant with a line and an empty section is not being difficult; it is out of staff, or out of housing for staff. The rules and etiquette guide covers the rest of island manners.
• Expect to wait for takeout and delivery. From late June to Labor Day the island's kitchens run at capacity every night, and in our experience a takeout or delivery order that would take fifteen minutes in a mainland town routinely takes thirty to forty-five here, sometimes longer on a Friday or Saturday. That is not a broken app or a lazy kitchen; it is a small staff cooking for a town five times its size. Order before you are hungry, do not stack a pickup on top of a ferry departure, and tip the runner who brings it to the door.
• Curious about working here yourself? American students find summer jobs through the island's businesses directly, usually with housing as the deciding question; the seasonal-housing scramble is real, so start in winter. International students go through a State Department sponsor, never through a business directly.

At a glance

How we checked this

Programme rules are from the State Department's Summer Work Travel pages. The 2025 J-1 count, the housing figures, the wage figures and the business owners' comments are from the Martha's Vineyard Times' reporting on the seasonal economy in May 2026; the H-2B numbers and the employers' hiring from the Vineyard Gazette; the Brazilian community figures from the Boston Globe and the Dukes County health assessment. Visa policy changes year to year at the federal level, so the counts will move; the arithmetic will not.