Trump Immigration Changes Are Killing Maryland's Crab Industry

Small manufacturers are not the only ones suffering under Der Trumpenführer's failed economic policies.  In Maryland, that state's signature crab industry is reeling - I suspect Virginia is experiencing the same phenomenon - thanks to Trump's anti-immigrant policies that are keeping seasonal workers from Mexico from coming and doing work key to the crab industry that Americans simply will not do.  Some businesses are considering closing down and moving to Mexico. It's yet another example of Trump's "winning" that makes American businesses losers and leaves Americans losing their jobs.  The Washington Post looks at the damage being done to a long standing industry.  Here are excerpts: 

Normally, the crabs would be steamed and hauled through double doors to a long, fluorescent-lit room, where dozens of employees at Russell Hall Seafood would extract the meat. But on this day, the steel tables inside that room sat empty.

“There’s nothing going on at all,” said owner Harry Phillips, “ ’cause we haven’t got our pickers.”

Changes to a foreign-worker visa program have left businesses like Russell Hall without the seasonal laborers — mostly from Mexico — who help drive Maryland’s signature industry.

About a third of picking jobs remain unfilled across the Eastern Shore this summer, as few Americans have responded to openings and Mexican laborers are stranded at home without permission to come here to work.

The situation illustrates a general unwillingness among U.S. workers to perform certain kinds of labor, some of the business owners here in Dorchester County say. It also demonstrates how President Trump’s “America First” policies have not necessarily helped those workers or small-business owners but instead have dealt them a new economic reality.

Crab-picking houses are boosting wages and expanding overtime but are losing customers — and profits — because they can’t provide a reliable supply of crabmeat. One local supplier buys meat elsewhere to serve at its restaurant because the in-house picking plant has none. And at Russell Hall, Phillips is weighing whether to pack up and move his operation to Mexico. . . . . “Our girls are right in Mexico, and they have crabs just like we have.”

Since he took charge of the family business in 1992, Phillips has hired 50 Mexican workers a year through the H-2B visa program to work summer through fall. Most were women. Some had been coming for 18 years. But changes to the program shut him out this year.

The Trump administration announced this past winter that it would distribute the temporary visas through a lottery — not the first-come, first-served system previously in place. In addition, Congress dropped a rule in 2017 that said workers who had gotten visas in the past could get them again without counting toward the annual cap.

“It’s just ridiculous,” said Phillips, who failed to secure any visas when the first 33,000 were allocated in February or when an additional 15,000 were issued in June. “I’m not a gambler. I want to know I got my crew.”

Just under half of Russell Hall’s business comes from picked crabmeat used by restaurants to make crab cakes and other delicacies. For now, the company is trying to stay afloat through its sale of whole crabs and menhaden, which are used for bait.

Phillips said he has lost about 20 customers — hotels in Ocean City, restaurants in Baltimore and seafood shops from as far as Massachusetts — who are turning to vendors with a more reliable supply. “We used to sell 800 to a thousand pounds of crabmeat a day,” Phillips said, “but now, we’re producing nothing.”

A 10-minute drive away, Aubrey Vincent faces similar woes. While she was able to secure about 40 of the 104 visas she requested at her family’s picking house, Lindy’s Seafood, the shortage means she can’t run the business as she did last summer.

Generations ago, picking was the job of women born and raised on Hoopers Island. They spent their days extracting the crabmeat as their watermen husbands went out on the Chesapeake to catch the crustaceans.

But as these couples have aged, their children have not followed in their footsteps. Many families have left the area entirely, their homes converted to vacation rentals. Young people who are still around tend to look for office jobs farther inland.

Hampton, Virginia, has a large crab industry and I recall seeing Mexican workers in the past picking crabs.  I suspect they are not faring well either.