Trump's visa changes are clawing a famous crab town. And they voted for him.

[Mileage Psycho]

Harvest season should get real interesting in the coming months.

Quote

 

Trump's visa changes are clawing a famous crab town. And they voted for him.

HOOPERS ISLAND, Maryland — This community voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. But now his immigration restrictions are killing their livelihood — legendary crabs that are a mainstay of the local economy and a regional delicacy.

For decades, Hoopers Island, known for its crabbing industry, has relied on a federal seasonal work program — known as H-2B visas — to keep its businesses humming. This has allowed employers to hire foreigners, mostly Mexican women, to come temporarily to pick crab meat.

But this year, the Trump administration's cap on H-2B visas — and a shift from a first-come, first-served based model to a lottery system that has disadvantaged Hoopers Island seasonal workers — has left the island without 40 percent of the visas they have needed in the past.

"Right now, we're shut down," said Morgan Tolley, manager of A.E. Phillips and Sons Seafood. "We're in self preservation mode."

Just two miles away, in what should be the start to the peak season, Harry Phillips, the owner of Russell Hall Seafood, stands in an empty picking room once filled with the women he's had working for him for over 25 years.

"We can't operate the way we're going," Phillips told NBC News. "I've had to let truck drivers go. I don't need truck drivers if I don't have the product. It's going to affect us to the point where we may have to totally close."

"(President Trump's) vow was to create American jobs, but this is not creating American jobs," Phillips said.

In 2016, Trump won easily in Dorchester County, which includes all of Hoopers Island, largely based off of his pledge to help small businesses.

Capt. Larry "Boo" Powley, a fifth-generation fisherman who makes his living catching bait for crabs, pulls his boat into Russell Hall and says his small business is hurting. At a time when he would usually bring in roughly 300 boxes of crab bait, he's been limited to just 100 boxes a day.

"The more demand that there is for bait, the better I do," Powley said. "Right now, there's no demand because they can't handle the crabs because they have no pickers. And it's really hurting us right now."

"How would you like to be in business for 30 years and they tell you, 'Well, we're going to pick out of a hat if you're going to run your business or not?' How do people stay in business? Does Washington not get it? You've got to have workers," Powley said.

For years, Powley and other watermen have fished for crab bait to deliver to processors like Russell Hall Seafood. Those processors use the fish, particularly menhaden, to lure crabs, bring them back to their facilities and steam them. Once they're steamed, these seasonal workers, who stay from roughly April to November, pick the meat from the crabs, package it and send it off to stores and restaurants.

While the town usually receives 500 visas for crab pickers, this year only about 300 were approved.

Forty years ago, women who lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore would pick crab meat. But as their children grew older, more educated and left town, that workforce dried up and businesses turned to the H-2B visa program to bring in foreign workers.

"We've been doing this 25 years the right way, the way the government wanted," Phillips said. "They're not a threat to the community, they spend money in the community and they do their banking here. So to me that looks like a win-win situation."

"I do not have any Americans that want to do this job," said Brian Hall, the owner of G.W. Hall & Sons seafood, one of the few facilities on the island that was able to secure enough H-2B visas this year. "We support a lot of different businesses from a lot of different states and it's all because of these H-2B girls."

The Trump administration is expected to add about 15,000 H-2B visa this year because of high demand. But with crabbing season already underway, and because of the long trek from Mexico to Hoopers Island, many here worry that it may be too little, too late.

Of the eight crab processing facilities on Hoopers Island, only four received the visas they requested. Beyond those businesses, others are feeling the effects as well.

"Our business has very much suffered because of the loss of the people here," said Katie Doll, the owner of Hoopers Island General Store, the only general store within 30 miles. "The trucks aren't running, the boats aren't working, our hours are less."

Beyond Hoopers Island, the new policy is not only costing jobs, but is expected to hit consumers who enjoy the famous Maryland Blue Crabs. "A typical crab cake might be four times the price," Doll said.

But given the chance, many Hoopers Island resident say they'd vote for Trump again. They say that if he knew about their struggling businesses, he would change his policy.

"I just don't think Donald Trump knows what's going on down here right now," Powley said. "Because if you're for business, well, you're putting businesses out of work here."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trumps-visa-changes-are-clawing-a-famous-crab-town-and-they-voted-for-him/ar-AAxiC8I

 

 

[Zambroski]

IMPEACH!!!!

 

[Whiskey Tango Foxtrot]

it would appear to make more sense for the crab processors to recruit workers from Baltimore City (which, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has an unemployment rate of 6.4 percent) or Salisbury, Md., (which has 11,400 unemployed workers, for an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent according to BLS, and which is an hour away from Fishing Creek) than to recruit them from Mexico.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Maryland-Needs-H2B-Crab-Pickers

[Mileage Psycho]

4 minutes ago, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot said:

it would appear to make more sense for the crab processors to recruit workers from Baltimore City (which, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has an unemployment rate of 6.4 percent) or Salisbury, Md., (which has 11,400 unemployed workers, for an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent according to BLS, and which is an hour away from Fishing Creek) than to recruit them from Mexico.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Maryland-Needs-H2B-Crab-Pickers

[Mileage Psycho]

11 minutes ago, Zambroski said:

IMPEACH!!!!

 

Not a chance, those crabbers will vote for Trump again

They should send Trump a note or maybe a smoke signal

Quote

 

But given the chance, many Hoopers Island resident say they'd vote for Trump again. They say that if he knew about their struggling businesses, he would change his policy.

"I just don't think Donald Trump knows what's going on down here right now," Powley said. "Because if you're for business, well, you're putting businesses out of work here."

 

 

[ICEMAN!]

I saw an article yesterday about some landscaper/lawn care guy crying about the same thing

[Highmark]

Wonder what they are paid?  Sounds like modern day slavery to me.   "The town receives."  SMH.   Are they shipped in shackled on boats?  What do they do when they are done with the season....ship them back?  Is this for the betterment of the town or the people they are hiring.   What a disgusting way to define workers. 

While the town usually receives 500 visas for crab pickers, this year only about 300 were approved.

Edited May 15, 2018 by Highmark

[Rigid1]

2 hours ago, Highmark said:

Wonder what they are paid?  Sounds like modern day slavery to me.   "The town receives."  SMH.   Are they shipped in shackled on boats?  What do they do when they are done with the season....ship them back?  Is this for the betterment of the town or the people they are hiring.   What a disgusting way to define workers. 

While the town usually receives 500 visas for crab pickers, this year only about 300 were approved.

I wonder if the visa # is down because the # of harvestable crabs is down?? that would make a whole lot of sense..

 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-crab-population-20180509-story.html

[Highmark]

6 minutes ago, Rigid1 said:

I wonder if the visa # is down because the # of harvestable crabs is down?? that would make a whole lot of sense..

 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-crab-population-20180509-story.html

Wasn't all that long ago the same groups were pissing and moaning about fed pay standards for these same workers.  Like I've always said.   Immigration isn't about helping anyone but themselves.  Cheap labor and votes.   This is modern day slavery.   Sure come here and pick crab meat for us and we will pay you $7.50 hr.   

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-crabs-labor-rule-20110914-story.html

The U.S. allows 66,000 foreigners to come to the country for several months each year under what is known as the H-2B visa program. The temporary workers are hired for seasonal industries such as crab picking, oyster shucking or landscaping; they are required to return home once the season is over.

Labor Department officials proposed higher wages for H-2B workers in January after a federal court struck down guidelines for the program crafted by the Bush administration. Under the new rules, workers in Maryland who now make $7.25 an hour would receive $9.24, according to the industry. In North Carolina, the rate in some cases would increase from $7.43 to $11.18.

The change was initially to take effect next year, but the department was forced by a separate court order to speed up the transition. Now, the higher wages are set to begin in the middle of this year's crab season.

Administration officials and advocates for the unemployed argue that more of the H-2B jobs could be filled by U.S. workers if companies paid higher wages, particularly given the nation's 9.1 percent unemployment rate.

[Highmark]

More recent article.  $3-4 hr less than locals.   No wonder they want so many.  

H2-B Crabpickers are so Important to the Maryland Seafood Industry

Posted May 26, 2017 at 2:10 pm by Daniel Costa 


H-2B crabpickers are so important to the Maryland seafood industry that they get paid $3 less per hour than the state or local average wage


Earlier this week, Washington D.C.’s WAMU aired a report highlighting—and celebrating—the hardworking Mexican women on Maryland’s Eastern Shore who pick crabmeat by hand. The Mexican women are in the United States temporarily, on a nonimmigrant guestworker visa called H-2B, which allows employers to hire migrant workers for non-agricultural seasonal jobs. The subheading of the story reads “Maryland crab processors say they couldn’t stay in business without Mexican guestworkers.” A tweet with an accompanying GIF from WAMU suggests that the reason employers hire H-2B workers to pick crab is because they’re so fast at what they do.


Impressive to say the least. I don’t doubt how productive and valuable these workers are. Their bosses say they’re the heart of the crab industry. But upon closer inspection, it seems the seafood companies don’t really think this important work is worth a fair wage. The companies have lobbied tenaciously to make sure that the legal and regulatory framework of the H-2B visa program allows them to legally underpay their workers compared to what they would have to pay to attract workers in the free market—and the two employers featured in the WAMU story are perfect examples.


Maryland crab is delicious, if you can afford it. At $30 to $50 per pound, it’s certainly not cheap. That’s why I was curious to know just how much these H-2B workers were valued by their employers. I looked up the H-2B disclosure data from the Department of Labor (DOL) for two of the seafood processors highlighted in the WAMU report, Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons. According to those records, in fiscal 2017, DOL certified 50 H-2B jobs for Russell Hall Seafood and 30 for G.W. Hall and Sons.


According to WAMU, the H-2B workers are paid $9.50 an hour. The DOL data list the wages employers promise to pay their H-2B workers, and indeed both promised to pay $9.51 an hour for the 2017 season. If this seems too low for this grueling work—work that requires especially talented and fast workers from Mexico—that’s because it is.


All of the labor certifications for these 80 H-2B workers were classified under the occupational title of “Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers,” which is one of the top H-2B occupations every year. According to DOL survey data, the national average wage for this occupation is $12.27 per hour, and the Maryland statewide average wage is $13.32 per hour. The $9.51 the two employers pay their H-2B workers is $3.81 less per hour than the statewide average wage. $9.51 is also lower than the local average wage, according to another database using the same DOL data set: the average wage for Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers in the “Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland nonmetropolitan area” is $12.87 per hour (see “Mean Wage (H-2B)” on this page). That means the local average wage for crabpicking is $3.36 more per hour than what Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons pay their H-2B guestworkers. $9.51 per hour isn’t even much more than the current Maryland state minimum wage of $8.75 per hour.


How are employers allowed to pay such low wages to their H-2B workers? At the very end of the George W. Bush administration, DOL changed the H-2B wage rules to allow employers to pay much lower-than-average wage rates. The rule was later found by a federal court to have been illegally promulgated, and Obama’s DOL proposed to fix this early in the administration with a rule that required employers to pay their H-2B workers the local average wage for every H-2B job (according to DOL wage survey data). The new rule also restricted the use of employer-conducted private wage surveys, which is another way to establish the minimum wage rate that must be paid to an H-2B worker. As you can imagine, employers never use private wage surveys so that they can pay their workers more—they only use them to lower the minimum wage they have to pay.


For nearly the rest of the Obama administration, H-2B employers managed to stop the wage rules from being enforced, both through litigation and by convincing Congress to defund DOL’s enforcement of the rules. Eventually, in April 2015, DOL and the Department of Homeland Security promulgated a new H-2B rule which required employers to pay the local average wage, and which included new, stricter rules for private wage surveys. But employers got around that again by lobbying successfully for a number of H-2B legislative riders in the fiscal 2016 omnibus appropriations bill, which included a provision expanding the use of private wage surveys. This provision was renewed in 2017, and the results so far have been unsurprising: wages are too low. According to my analysis, nationwide, the average wage employers promised to pay for the 5,447 H-2B jobs certified in Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers was $9.67 per hour. Since the national average hourly wage for all of the workers in that occupation is $12.27 per hour, that amounts to an average wage savings for employers of $2.60 per hour per worker, if they pay their workers via the H-2B wage rules rather than paying what they would have to pay to attract workers in the free market.


Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons have benefited from the private wage survey rules and appropriations riders directly. According to DOL disclosure data, both had private wage surveys approved that allowed them to pay $8.61 per hour in 2016 and $9.51 in 2017; much lower than the local average wage of $12.87. Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons were also at the forefront of pushing wages down for H-2B workers—having complained publicly over the years that attempts to increase H-2B wage rates would put them out of business. In two news reports from 2011, they argued that paying their H-2B crabpickers more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would put them out of business. Well now they’re paying $9.50 and seem to be doing just fine.


The quick, talented women who come from Mexico on H-2B visas to pick crabmeat in Maryland deserve to be paid $3 to $4 dollars more per hour—at least the local or state average wage for the jobs they do. And who knows? At $13 an hour, maybe some Maryland residents would want to give crabpicking a try, just as they did before the H-2B visa was created.


http://www.epi.org/blog/h-2b-crabpic...-than-average/

Edited May 15, 2018 by Highmark

[Pete]

But but but this is all trumps fault..

[Snoslinger]

32 minutes ago, Rigid1 said:

I wonder if the visa # is down because the # of harvestable crabs is down?? that would make a whole lot of sense..

 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-crab-population-20180509-story.html

read the end of that article. I love crabs, but man have they gotten expensive over the years. what used to be less than $20 a dozen for large, is now in the $50 range. I refuse to pay those prices.

[Kivalo]

Fuck those god damn sea spiders! Fucking gross!

Edited May 15, 2018 by Kivalo

[Highmark]

1 hour ago, Snoslinger said:

read the end of that article. I love crabs, but man have they gotten expensive over the years. what used to be less than $20 a dozen for large, is now in the $50 range. I refuse to pay those prices.

Change your occupation to an industrial electrician.   Then you will be able to afford it. 

Edited May 15, 2018 by Highmark

[Snoslinger]

38 minutes ago, Highmark said:

Change your occupation to an industrial electrician.   Then you will be able to afford it. 

 

[Snoslinger]

1 hour ago, Kivalo said:

Fuck those god damn sea spiders! Fucking gross!

you're probably not eating them right. I've seen people not familiar with these type crabs order them and then smash the shit out of them with a mallet, wondering where the meat is.

 

 

[Kivalo]

1 minute ago, Snoslinger said:

you're probably not eating them right. I've seen people not familiar with these type crabs order them and then smash the shit out of them with a mallet, wondering where the meat is.

 

 

Fuck that, lobster & crabs...they both are disgusting!

[Snoslinger]

Just now, Kivalo said:

Fuck that, lobster & crabs...they both are disgusting!

you're nuts...

[Kivalo]

1 minute ago, Snoslinger said:

you're nuts...

Nope, those things are gross.

[Snoslinger]

crabs, lobster, scallops, clams etc in hot butter?

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[AKIQPilot]

4 minutes ago, Snoslinger said:

crabs, lobster, scallops, clams etc in hot butter?

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Yummmm for sure. 

[BOHICA]

Low level, low threat offenders in jail should be used to fill these vacancies.  The crab processors/pickers can then pay the prison system for the labor provided to help off set the cost of incarceration funded by tax payers.  This way prisoners wouldnt be taking Jobs from Americans cause Americans would not take those jobs anyways as proof by the need for visas.  Also if it is a shitty job it may serve as a deterrent to repeat offenders that have the threat of having to work a shitty job while incarcerated.  Also some may find a new profession and establish the feeling of self worth and accomplishment! 

[Angry ginger]

7 hours ago, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot said:

it would appear to make more sense for the crab processors to recruit workers from Baltimore City (which, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has an unemployment rate of 6.4 percent) or Salisbury, Md., (which has 11,400 unemployed workers, for an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent according to BLS, and which is an hour away from Fishing Creek) than to recruit them from Mexico.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Maryland-Needs-H2B-Crab-Pickers

hiring inner city blacks who don't want to works going to be real successful,  how do you think they are going to get to work anyways.     

[Angry ginger]

2 minutes ago, BOHICA said:

Low level, low threat offenders in jail should be used to fill these vacancies.  The crab processors/pickers can then pay the prison system for the labor provided to help off set the cost of incarceration funded by tax payers.  This way prisoners wouldnt be taking Jobs from Americans cause Americans would not take those jobs anyways as proof by the need for visas.  Also if it is a shitty job it may serve as a deterrent to repeat offenders that have the threat of having to work a shitty job while incarcerated.  Also some may find a new profession and establish the feeling of self worth and accomplishment! 

moto will love your use of slave labor to process

[BOHICA]

Just now, Angry ginger said:

moto will love your use of slave labor to process

It’s slave labor with the h2b’s...