WaPo reports on one of the negative consequences of President Trump’s constraints on legal migrant Mexican workers:
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.
But it may be damn good for the crabs. No, not humor, just fact. A little less consumption means a few more crabs, doing there thing, out in the environment.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Michael Bars said his agency — which manages the H-2B program — is “focused on ensuring the integrity of the immigration system and protecting the interests of U.S. workers.”
“We are committed to reforming employment-based immigration programs so they benefit the American people to the greatest extent possible,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Bars and his boss, President Trump, may actually be accomplishing it – just not in quite the way envisioned. And, of course, at the expense of those running the crabbing business.
But, like the American farmer, some American workers have been sacrificed for the good of President Trump the rest of us.
