Selling crab meat has been the livelihood of Aubrey Vincent’s family since at least the mid-1980s, when her father bought Lindy’s Seafood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
It’s a business that relies on the federal H-2B visa program, through which migrant workers — chiefly from Mexico — are hired to pick meat out of the indigenous crustaceans from the start of the spring through the autumn.
“The program essentially has kept the Maryland crab meat industry alive,” Vincent, the sales manager at Lindy’s, told the Washington Examiner. For roughly 24 years, Vincent said, Lindy’s had little trouble securing the 105 visas it needs.
Then came 2018, when the Trump administration distributed visas through a lottery rather than according to the order of requests, and Lindy’s and several of the crab plants on the Eastern Shore were unable to get their share of the 500 seasonal workers the industry typically requires.
The lottery compounded the problems from a decision by Congress two years earlier to let lapse a rule allowing workers from previous years return without counting toward a cap of 66,000 on new visas, which left the supply far short of demand from businesses.
[Related: Trump moves toward high-skill immigration system]
As a result, Vincent’s Dorchester County operation lost six months of work and 50% of its sales revenue. It wasn’t until October, as the season neared its end, that she was able to secure 75 H-2B visas after the government allotted additional ones.
If the crab house had lost the visas it needed this year, “I’m not sure we would’ve been able to stay in business,” said Vincent, who’s elated by the Trump administration’s decision to allocate 30,000 more visas.
The move delighted not only her peers in Maryland’s crab industry but top state officials, including Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.
“This news could not come at a better time, after we just learned that our blue crab population is booming,” the governor said.
Trump made immigration a focal point of his 2016 presidential campaign, during which he vowed to build a wall along the southern border and claimed illegal immigrants were taking jobs away from Americans.
“This increase in H-2B visas is not consistent with the ‘hire American’ policy,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants to reduce the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S.
[Also read: Immigration restrictionists say Trump broke promise by issuing 30,000 extra seasonal visas]
Krikorian told the Washington Examiner that the Trump administration should end the H-2B program entirely or phase it out over several years. Employers, he argued, have effectively become addicted to low-cost labor.
“The H-2B program has literally no justification whatsoever,” Krikorian said. “All the jobs that H-2Bs do are done very frequently by Americans and legal workers already here. There’s simply no excuse for it other than a desire for cheap, controllable labor and an easier time of finding labor.”
Krikorian also questioned how hard businesses that use the program have tried to recruit American workers.
“Have you changed your recruitment practices? Have you offered free rides and free housing to people from Baltimore who may or not may not be willing to do it? That’s how you recruit people,” Krikorian said. “You cast your net wider and look for workers in places you haven’t looked before.”
In Dorchester County, considered the center of Maryland’s crab industry, Trump won 56.6% of the vote in 2016, but crab businesses could be in jeopardy if the president follows Krikorian’s advice.
“We wouldn’t be in business if we didn’t have these workers,” said Bill Sieling, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. “We’ve had 20 years of experience trying to find the domestic workers, and after 20 years, we still haven’t found people that want to go down to rural areas and do a job that’s not very glamorous.”
In 2018 alone, the impact from the dearth of laborers rippled far beyond Dorchester County’s crab houses. The general store on Hoopers Island, where customers include many workers with H-2B visas, was nearly forced to lay people off due to the drop in business, Sieling said. A 2008 study from the University of Maryland indicated that each H-2B visa job lost would lead to the loss of 2.5 domestic positions in the state.
The laborers, many of whom return to the same crab houses year after year, also suffered. Foreign workers employed by Lindy’s had to make wrenching financial decisions to ensure they had money for necessities, said Vincent. “Last year was heartbreaking.” Vincent estimates roughly 95% of her seasonal employees have returned for the past 20 years, and she’s now employing the children of people who retired from picking crab meat.
“Those people are left in the lurches,” she said. “It was a negative impact for us and everyone around us.”
Sieling, who’s fighting to eliminate the cap on H-2B visas, said it’s particularly difficult for crab houses to fill seasonal jobs like picking meat when unemployment is low, as it is now.
The area’s crab houses “took a financial hit last year, and I doubt they could’ve survived two years like that,” Sieling said. “These are not big corporations that have big trust funds they can rely on. They’re small businesses.”
While Vincent and Sieling would both like to see Congress implement a permanent legislative fix, partisan gridlock has left little optimism.
“This year, by the grace of God and a long-handled spoon, all of our processors got exactly what they asked for on time. But next year could be totally different,” Sieling said. “We have no idea what Congress may or may not do. Given the current state of Congress, it doesn’t seem like they’ll do anything.”
