CRAB CRISIS
Maryland seafood industry loses 40% of workforce in visa lottery
The Baltimore Sun
Maryland’s seafood industry is in crisis: Nearly half of the Eastern Shore’s crab houses have no workers to pick the meat sold in restaurants and supermarkets.
They failed to get visas for their mostly Mexican workforce, including many women who have been coming north to Maryland for crab season for as long as two decades. The Trump administration for the first time awarded them this year in a lottery, instead of on a first-come, first-served basis.
“This is going to cause the price of crab meat to go out of sight,” said Harry Phillips, owner of Russell Hall Seafood on Hooper’s Island. “There’s not going to be hardly any Maryland crab meat.
“It looks like it’s a matter of time before they’re going to shut all of us down.”
Visa shortages have been a perennial issue for the crab industry since the last generations of Eastern Shore women who once picked crabmeat aged out of the tedious seasonal work. In the 1980s, crab houses started bringing workers from Mexico through a program that lets them live and work in the United States during the warmer months and then return home in the winter, when watermen are prohibited from crabbing.
But crab house owners say these are the most dire circumstances they have faced. They hope federal immigration officials issue more visas in response to skyrocketing demand for seasonal foreign workers. But if they have to compete in another lottery, they say, they worry there won’t be enough to fill their facilities.
“Companies that have been relying on this system for 25 years suddenly have no workers,” said Bill Seiling, director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. “It’s totally unfair and irrational, really.”
The crisis is hitting just as crab season begins. Watermen were allowed to start dropping crab pots into the Chesapeake and its tributaries April 1, but with cold weather through the month, crabs were slow to emerge from hibernation burrowed in mud.
As temperatures rise, this year’s crop of crustaceans is now emerging.
It’s unclear whether or how quickly the problem could be resolved, or what effect it could have on crab prices this year. Many of the crabs sold in Maryland come from the Carolinas or Louisiana, and some meat comes from Asia or Venezuela. But a premium is placed on local meat, with a state program called “True Blue” to identify and market Maryland crabs.
Crab processors theorized that a drastically reduced supply from a shortage of workers could send the price of picked meat skyrocketing. But it could lower the price of steamed crabs, flooding the market with many of the female and undersized crabs that would otherwise get picked.
“We need these processing plants to keep the market running smooth,” said Bryan Hall, of G.W. Hall and Sons on Hooper’s Island.
G.W. Hall is one of the lucky houses that did get the 30 visas it applied for, but Mr. Hall said he doesn’t feel fortunate.
“I got them, but I don’t feel right having them,” he said. “It’s not right for me to have them and my fellow people who I deal with not to have them. They depend on them just as much as I do, and they’ve got families to feed just as much as I do.”
Maryland’s 20 licensed crab processors typically employ some 500 foreign workers each season, from April to November, through the H-2B visa program, Mr. Seiling said. The visas are for seasonal workers in non-agricultural jobs. Pickers are paid by the pound of meat they produce, and the most productive ones make up to $500 a week.
“Nobody wants to do manual labor anymore,” Mr. Seiling said. “Its just a very, very tight labor market right now, particularly in industries that are seasonal.”
But in February, Mr. Seiling said, applications for about 200 of those visas were denied. That leaves women used to making an annual pilgrimage to Maryland stuck at home, with limited options to feed their families.
Federal labor officials said there was “unprecedented” demand for H-2B visas in January. They received applications for 81,000 foreign workers when only 33,000 visas were available for work from April through September. The visas have become increasingly desirable over the past five years as overall U.S. unemployment falls.
In the second part of a two-step visa application process, U.S. Customs and Immigration Services received applications to bring some 47,000 workers into the United States for that six-month period. Because there were so many requests, officials decided to award visas by lottery.
Congress included a provision in the $1.3 trillion spending plan it approved in March that authorizes federal immigration officials to issue more H-2B visas.