It is fact that Hoopers Island has been enlivened each spring by the arrival of several dozen Mexicans – women who bring with them tortillas and tamales, mariachi music and the hands that make the local economy go. These foreign labours do mean work in Maryland’s seafood industry, spending long days picking the premium lump meat out of the blue crab – work that the men who run the seafood processing plants that dot the island say Americans won’t do.
But this year, the crab houses could stay closed as they wont be able to visas to bring the foreigners into the country this year. If Congress does not move quickly to make more available, other processors say they won’t open this spring. And the loss of a year’s income, several say, means that they probably would shut their businesses for good.
The H2B visa program allows foreigners to come to the United States for several months to work in a seasonal industry, such as crab picking or landscaping. When the season is over, the workers go home. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who created the so-called returning worker exemption four years ago, introduced legislation yesterday that would revive it.
Hall opined that the whole industry’s going to be gone and we need help to save this way of life. The processors say they fell victim to a bureaucracy that never gave them a chance. Critics of the H2B visas say the foreigners, who come almost exclusively from developing countries, depress wages for local workers. Jack Martin of the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, expressed that employers are, in effect, using the program simply to have a low-wage work force.
