HOOPERSVILLE, US: As crab season arrived in Hoopersville, Maryland, locals began asking where Jose Bronero Cruz was. For two decades, he had traveled from Mexico to the remote town to pick crab meat, but this spring, he did not arrive.
Nor did any of the other foreign workers Janet Rippons-Ruark relies on to process meat from the blue crabs Maryland is famous for, exacerbating a worker shortage that ballooned into a crisis for the eastern US state’s iconic industry.
“We’ve survived COVID-19. But we’re in an area where there is just not local help,” Rippons-Ruark said. A shortage of visas for foreign workers combined with disruptions caused by the pandemic paralyzed parts of Maryland’s crab industry this year, forcing two-thirds of the major seafood processors to scrape by on the few employees they could find, or close entirely.
A batch of visas issued at the start of October finally allowed Cruz and other guest workers to enter the country, but amid the prolonged deadlock over immigration policy in Washington that shows no sign of abating soon, crab industry leaders fret for their future.
“Whether we’ll survive the staffing thing ... That remains to be seen,” said Jack Brooks, president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association.
Blue crabs pulled from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay are perhaps Maryland’s best-known export, with the state the second-largest producer of the 2018 US harvest valued at $188.4 million, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The industry is at the mercy of weather — as well as regulations intended to protect crab habitats, but processors can also enjoy booms during years like 2020, when prices rose as the pandemic’s arrival seemed to increase crab’s popularity.
“We’re not in what you call a growth industry at this point, but we do have a domestic product that a lot of people want,” Brooks said.
Less desirable is the work of processing crab, which involves steaming them, cracking open their shell, removing their gills and picking out the meat for sale — a job industry leaders say few Americans want to do, particularly since workers are employed for only part of the year.
Processors rely on guest workers from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America entering on temporary H-2B visas to extract the crabs, though migrant rights groups have also accused the industry of giving workers poor housing and insufficient health care access.
For Cruz, journeying all the way from Tabasco state in southern Mexico to Hoopersville, located on a dead-end road so low-lying that waves splash onto it, is better than trying to find work back home.
“In Mexico, you don’t make money,” Cruz, 46, told AFP.
“Here, you do.”
US law allows 66,000 H-2B visas to be issued each year and Brooks said the Maryland crab industry needs only around 450.
More than 99,000 requests for visas were received at the start of 2020, according to the Department of Labor.
But Brooks said a change in the procedure for allocating the visas caused disaster when only three processors were given the authorizations they needed as the season began in April.
The government in March said it would give out 35,000 more visas, but the plan was abandoned when the pandemic descended.
