visas - Chestertown Spy

Md. Crabbing Industry Fears Long-Term Effects of 2020 Visa Shortages

May 5, 2020 by Maryland Matters

Maryland’s famous crab industry is facing an uphill battle. With another year of visa caps, there’s a severe shortage of migrant workers to work as crab pickers ― and few Americans willing to do the job. This year, Maryland crabbers fear for the life of an industry that has been in their families for generations.

Only nine crab processors ― which represent 95% of the state’s crab meat production ― remain in Maryland. The processors ― or picking houses ― rely on about 500 foreign seasonal workers to pick crabmeat each year. To work in the United States those workers need H-2B visas designated for temporary non-agricultural workers.

Maryland has received about 160 visas ― 340 short of what the industry says it needs.

A History of Visa Shortages

Crab processors have struggled with visa shortages for years, mostly because of competition from other seasonal businesses, including landscaping and construction.

In 2018, demand for visas was so large that the Department of Homeland Security began awarding the visas through a lottery system.

“It was just awful,” Jack Brooks, president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, said about the 2018 visa shortage. “Watermen did not have a good market. These companies could not process and there was a huge loss of consumer confidence. Your customers want to make sure they have a reliable source of fresh Maryland crab.”

In 2019, the Labor Department issued visas on a first-come, first-served basis, and all nine processors were able to get H-2B visa workers.

This year, the Department of Labor also created a lottery system for their portion of the visa process, in addition to the Department of Homeland Security lottery, creating yet another hurdle for recipients.

Brooks, who runs Cambridge-based J.M. Clayton Seafood Company, was one of three lucky crab processors who were able to get visas. His company will have 88 H-2B visa workers arriving within a couple of weeks.

“We feel horrible for our colleagues,” Brooks said. “I mean, we’ve all been locked out before and know what it’s like, and it’s just horrible.”

Very few processors in Virginia were able to secure visas, Brooks said.

Processing houses that didn’t secure visas are dark, Brooks said. “The lights are off. Here we are just almost a month into our season and the lights are out. What do they tell their customers? What do they tell their crabbers? It’s a horrific situation.”

No Local Labor Pool

At picking houses, workers scoop meat from freshly caught crabs ― the process is laborious but quick and requires much skill. Local workers shy away from working the difficult job, especially because eight out of the nine picking houses are located on Hoopers Island, a Chesapeake Bay community of about 600 residents, about a 40-minute drive from the commercial center in Cambridge.

“What college graduate can you train to pick a can of crab meat in six minutes?” said Dayme Hahn, the manager of Faidley Seafood, a famous crab cake purveyor in Baltimore. “If you sit there and watch these people, you would say, ‘I could never do that.’”

And few workers want a seasonal job. Crabbing is a heavily regulated industry, with the Department of Natural Resources deciding when the harvest starts and ends each year ― usually sometime between April and November.

“What do those people do during the seven months they can’t work? Go on unemployment?” Hahn asked. “It has been a really good relationship with southern hemisphere workers.”

Most H-2B visa recipients who work as crab pickers are women from Mexico.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult work,” said Thurka Sangaramoorthy, a cultural and medical anthropologist who studies immigration to the Eastern Shore. “And there’s a lot of pressure.”

Sangaramoorthy says the women get paid in a piecemeal fashion, by how fast they can pick. They work very long hours, living in a house with other women they usually don’t know, while leaving children and family members behind.

“The Eastern Shore can be a difficult place to live in. It’s very sparse,” Sangaramoorthy said. “For some women they enjoy the peace and quiet and the idyllic kind of setting and for others it’s very difficult.”

But, this is a really important livelihood for them, Sangaramoorthy said.

And workers are important for the life of the crab industry.

“The [H-2B visa] program really is life or death for the business, it is,” said Janet Rippons, who runs Rippons Brothers Seafood, a crab processor that wasn’t able to secure any visas this year. Rippons has lived and worked on Hoopers Island her entire life and her family has been crabbing for generations.

Rippons Brothers was one of the last companies to use the H-2B visa program, when they began doing so in 1996. Companies that decided not to use the program went out of business.

“For whatever reason, those owners and operators refused to hire foreign workers,” Brooks said. “And now they’re all gone. Each and every one of those companies are gone.”

Rippons fears that without foreign workers, that could happen again.

“Believe you me, I want to be able to find somebody so that I can provide my own products,” Rippons said. But, in the 24 years since Rippons Brothers started using the H-2B visa program, only three or four locals have wanted a job, Rippons says.

“Will we always have Maryland crab meat? I don’t know,” Rippons said. “Finding Americans that are willing to do this job, it’s not happening.”

Driven Out of the Industry

A study conducted by Maryland’s Best Seafood (a marketing program of Maryland’s agriculture department) found that, without H-2B visa workers, income for watermen would drop by $12.5 million, processors would lose $37 million to $49 million in sales, Maryland would lose 914-1,367 jobs and the overall hit to the state’s economy could be $100 million to $150 million.

“This survey reinforces what we have learned in previous years: a lack of reliable access to H-2B workers poses a major threat to the future of this iconic industry,” Maryland Department of Agriculture Secretary Joe Bartenfelder said in a press release.

“We are at the point where I honestly fear that the Maryland crab industry is at the brink of never coming back,” Hahn said. “And that’s a very scary place to be. Especially for me, who ― that’s our whole business model. Our business model at Faidley’s is Maryland seafood.”

Faidley’s has been around for 130 years ― Hahn’s great grandfather started selling seafood in 1886. And Hahn’s family has been buying from Rippons’ family, and other Eastern Shore families, ever since.

Restaurants and purveyors can import crabs from foreign countries, usually Venezuela, more cheaply. They can also import from other states. But, many local restaurants want Maryland crab.

Brooks says commercial crabbers will have a hard time making a living, with few workers to process their factory crabs.

“It’s going to be depressed,” Brooks said. “There will be days they can’t sell their catch at all, and there will be days they can only sell part of their catch.”

Hahn says watermen will continue to catch crabs for processors that have pickers, and for people who want to steam them and eat them at home. But, with expenses like gas, docking and licensing, Hahn fears that it will push many out of the industry.

“They’re going to have to go to another industry to make a living,” Hahn said. “And some of them ― by the end of this year ― will have decided to get out completely.”

What’s more, Hahn says, is that you are either raised in the industry and know what to do, or you aren’t. Hahn fears that if this generation of watermen leaves the industry, there won’t be another.

‘A Critical Matter’

Brooks is working with Maryland’s U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin, both Democrats, and U.S. Rep. Andrew Harris (R-Cockeysville) to find a permanent fix.

Industry advocates say that seafood shouldn’t be grouped with landscape and construction just because their food cannot be grown (agriculture receives H-2A visas, and is exempt from any sort of cap). They want the visa cap removed. And they want exemptions for returning workers, who usually go to the same employers every year.

The industry used to have an exemption, but it expired and hasn’t been taken up again.

A letter to the Department of Homeland Security ― signed by seven senators, including Van Hollen and Cardin ― called the visas a “critical matter.”

“Local seafood businesses earn their livelihoods based on perishable products and need H-2B workers to harvest and process their respective seafood products so they can sell those products,” the senators wrote. “If these local businesses lose a customer base one year, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to come back into the industry.”

For purveyors, processors and watermen, the situation looks dire. Even with a slowed economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry fears it will be scrambling for workers when demand picks up when things start back up.

“The whole Maryland crabbing industry is teetering on collapse,” Hahn said. “And, you know, when I listen to Janet Rippons and I listen to Jack Brooks, or I listen to these people down the Shore, my heart bleeds. Not just for them, but for us.”

By Samantha Hawkins

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Chesapeake Crab Industry Remains Crippled by Visa Shortage, Coronavirus

March 22, 2020 by Bay Journal

Responding to employers’ calls, including those of crab meat processing companies in Virginia and Maryland, the federal government announced March 5 that it would release an additional 35,000 temporary visas for foreign workers.

That still may not be enough to quench the Chesapeake Bay seafood houses’ demand for temporary workers, according to the trade group that represents the industry. And they may still arrive too late to help much or perhaps get stuck on the other side of the border, as the United States March 20 closed its Mexican border for unessential travel because of coronavirus concerns.

Several seafood company owners and watermen had implored the Trump administration to issue 64,000 more visas, the cap set by Congress.

Jack Brooks, co-owner of J.M. Clayton Seafood Co. in Cambridge, and president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, said he expects a worker shortfall, despite the government’s action.

Initially, the Department of Homeland Security doled out 33,000 work visas, which are in effect for six months beginning April 1. With the added 35,000 visas, the total still falls well short of the 100,000 slots that U.S. employers nationally had sought to fill.

The agency will likely conduct a lottery to determine which companies obtain visas, Brooks said.

“It’d be great to think that all of [the crab houses] get lucky and win, but I don’t think the odds are great that they all get staffed up,” he said.

The temporary visas, known as H-2B visas, are made available annually to workers in seafood, landscaping, construction and other seasonal fields. To be eligible, employers must prove there aren’t enough domestic workers willing or able to fill the positions.

Only three of the county’s nine picking houses had received their workers during the first visa release, businesses say.

Now, because of the sweeping coronavirus pandemic, it’s unclear if and when the additional 35,000 workers will arrive, said Amanda Wright, CEO of Virginia-based Phoenix Labor Consultants.

Releasing those visas “is not even being talked about now” at the federal government, said Wright, whose clients include Chesapeake seafood processors.

Mexico is one of the main sources of seafood workers. It’s likely they will be considered essential workers, but the United States has shuttered its embassy consulates in Mexico, which threatens to halt the visa application process.

Still, the government signaled it would continue processing workers who have previously participated in the program. The requirement for a face-to-face interview would be waived.

Meanwhile, Guatamala, another major supplier of H-2B workers, closed its borders for at least 15 days beginning March 16, adding more uncertainty to the situation.

Even if the administration were to begin taking employer applications immediately, Brooks said, the earliest that crab houses could expect to welcome the workers would be in early May. The Maryland crab season kicks off April 1.

“Customers are wondering, ‘Where am I going to get the crab meat?’” Brooks added.

A crab house that doesn’t receive any workers could be forced to close its doors for this season, with the possibility that it might never reopen because its customers and suppliers will have moved on, industry leaders say.

Several dozen watermen, crab industry leaders and local elected officials gathered March 2 inside a picking house on Hooper’s Island in rural Dorchester County, MD, to passionately plea for the Trump administration to release more visas.

Seafood is one of the island’s only industries. It is home to eight of the state’s 20 crab-picking houses.

“I hope everyone can see this is more than a job issue. [It’s] more of an American community issue,” said Aubrey Vincent, sales manager at Lindy’s Seafood on Hooper’s. “A lot of these family businesses are holding on by a thread.”

At picking houses, workers scoop meat from freshly caught crabs and collect the chunks into plastic containers to be sold to restaurants and retailers. The processors often struggle to find enough local employees, especially in places like Hooper’s Island, on Dorchester’s isolated coastline, which is a winding, 40-minute drive to the nearest Walmart and movie theater.

So, the businesses turn to foreign workers, mostly from Mexico. The jobs may be seasonal, but many workers return to the same employers year after year, industry members say.

“I consider these H-2B workers part of my family,” said Darlene Ruark of the W.T. Ruark & Co. picking house. “My son grew up with those workers, and they consider him family, too.”

But for the last 15 years, some picking houses have been left waiting for months to receive their workers or have been shut out altogether from the program. In 2018, for example, a new lottery-style allocation system left Dorchester’s processors with a 40% shortfall of foreign workers four months into the six-month season.

The region’s seafood industry blames the visa shortage on increasing competition from other business sectors. But above all, they blame Congress for not heeding their repeated calls to set a higher cap or separate seafood workers into a separate visa class.

“Isn’t this a bunch of B. S. that our government is here trying to put us out of business?” asked A.E. Phillips and Sons CEO Steve Phillips. “It’s stupid. It’s something that can be fixed in five minutes.”

Homeland Security temporarily raised the cap by as many as 30,000 workers in recent years to help meet business’ demands. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and several members of Congress from Maryland and Virginia had called on the administration to take that action once again.

Hogan described the additional visas as “welcome relief” but implored that “we still urgently need a long-term solution to this problem.”

The Maryland Department of Agriculture released an economic study on the day of the Hooper’s event, showing that the state’s economy would take up to a $150 million hit without the visa workers in the seafood industry.

By Jeremy Cox

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Feds Release Additional H-2B Visas to Help MD Seafood Industry

March 10, 2020 by Bay Journal

With less than a month until the start of the blue crab harvest in Maryland, federal officials have released an additional 35,000 temporary worker visas to help Eastern Shore’s crab picking houses and the seafood industry here and in other states.

The release of the supplemental H-2B visas for the second half of FY2020 comes with “new conditions to protect American workers, provide relief to seasonal employers who truly need it, and reduce fraud and abuse in the program,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a press release.

DHS said the program will “offer an opportunity for nationals of key Central American partner nations to work lawfully in the United States. Of the released H-2B visas, 10,000 are specifically designated for nationals of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, in support of these countries’ efforts to work with the U.S. to stem the flow of illegal migration in the region and encourage lawful migration to the United States.”

Gov. Larry Hogan, U.S. Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, and First District Congressman Andy Harris are among those who have been pushing for the supplemental visas, as they have in prior years.

Those officials and DHS agree that Congress needs to make long-term reforms to the H-2B visa program. Visas are released at the start of the fiscal year and quickly allocated, often leaving businesses who don’t need such workers until later — such as the crab processing houses — out of luck.

For the past few years, federal officials have granted requests for the release of supplemental visas to help the Shore’s crab processors and other seafood industries.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan

“I am pleased to report that our efforts to make additional H-2B visas available to help our state’s seafood industry have again proven successful,” Hogan said in a press release. “While we still urgently need a long-term solution to this problem, this announcement is welcome relief for our state’s iconic crab processing houses and seafood industry.”

Harris had sent a letter, signed by 151 members of the House and 38 senators, urging Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf to release, as quickly as possible, additional H-2B visas to meet seasonal labor demands.

“I applaud the Department of Homeland Security for approving the release of 35,000 supplemental H-2B visas in time for the upcoming summer season,” Harris said in a press release. “This is 5,000 more supplemental visas than had been approved last year.

Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md.-1st

“The record low unemployment rate under the Trump Administration and oversubscription to the H-2B visa program is a debilitating issue for the economy of Maryland’s First Congressional District and the country,” Harris said. “I commend President Trump and Acting Secretary Wolf for providing these extras visas — and I remain committed to working with my colleagues in Congress to pass a permanent solution to the chronic H-2B visa shortage across this country — something that only Congress can do.”

Homeland Security said the department is “taking significant steps to promote integrity in the program, combat fraud and abuse, and ensure the supplemental allocation aligns with the national interest.

“Reform measures include: requiring matching start dates on an H-2B petition and the employer’s start date of need; collaborating with the Department of Labor on increased employer site visits; and, generally limiting the supplemental visas to returning workers, who are known to follow immigration law in good faith.”

The supplemental visas will be made available in two batches to prevent a small handful of employers from using all the visas: 20,000 for start dates beginning April 1, and 15,000 for start dates beginning May 15. Adding a second batch will address specific congressional concerns about late-season filers.

Maryland’s Best Seafood, a marketing program within the Maryland Department of Agriculture, released a survey earlier this week measuring the economic impact of the state’s crab industry and the importance of the federal H-2B temporary visa program.

All eight crab processors surveyed agreed that the current lottery system for awarding temporary visa requests creates uncertainty that hurts their businesses, and that limiting the number of available H-2B visas hurts Maryland’s seafood industry as a whole.

Seven of the eight crab companies indicated that they would not open for the 2020 crab season without adequate H-2B workers.

Without these seasonal workers, the survey showed that income for watermen would drop by $12.5 million; processors would lose $37-$49 million in sales; Maryland would lose 914-1,367 jobs; and the overall hit to the state’s economy could be $100-$150 million.

Federal immigration officials had announced last month that they had doled out the national limit of 33,000 work visas, which are in effect for six months beginning April 1. That was far short of the nearly 100,000 slots that employers had sought to fill.

In Maryland, seafood processors say they received roughly one-third of the 450 visas they need for this season, which also kicks off April 1. The shortage, they warn, could force some of the affected processing plants to close their doors for this season, with the possibility that they might never reopen because their customers and suppliers will have moved on.

Workers pick crabs at Russell Hall Seafood in this file photo.

Several dozen watermen, crab industry leaders and local elected officials gathered March 2 inside a picking house on Hooper’s Island to passionately plead for the Trump administration to release 64,000 more visas, the limit set by Congress on how many can be added.

“I hope everyone can see this is more than a job issue, [it’s] more of an American community issue,” said Aubrey Vincent, sales manager at Lindy’s Seafood on Hooper’s, home to eight of the state’s 20 crab-picking houses. “A lot of these family businesses are holding on by a thread.”

For the last 15 years, some picking houses have been left waiting for months to receive their workers or been shut out altogether from the program. In 2018, for example, a new lottery-style allocation system left Dorchester’s processors with a 40% shortfall of foreign workers four months into the season.

So far this year, only three of the county’s nine picking houses have received their workers, businesses say.

“Isn’t this a bunch of B.S. that our government is here trying to put us out of business?” asked A.E. Phillips and Sons CEO Steve Phillips. “It’s stupid. It’s something that can be fixed in five minutes.”

Calls to expand the program face an uphill battle in an administration that has largely moved to constrict both legal and illegal immigration. The issue represents a rare point of conflict between Trump and voters in Dorchester County, which overwhelmingly supported him in 2016.

Some of the Hooper’s Island speakers appealed directly to the president.

“We follow the rules. We do it the right way,” said Jeanne Phillips of Hooper’s Island General Store. “So, please just let us do what we know how to do well. It’s hard enough to keep people in a county like this.

“President Trump, we’re counting on you to keep Hooper’s Island great for many generations to come.”

Staff writer Jeremy Cox of the Bay Journal News Service contributed to this article.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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