Delmarva blue crab industries might be able to hire more workers from outside the U.S. starting this spring. This as local industries cannot find enough US citizens willing to do the work.
The industry has claimed that a lack of foreign workers have left some boats and processing plants understaffed.
The Department of Homeland Security is expected to announce it’s making 45,000 more H2-B visas available.
The visa “allows U.S. employers or U.S. agents who meet specific regulatory requirements to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary nonagricultural jobs”.
Watermen and crab industry leaders gathered last March inside a picking house on Hooper’s Island in rural Dorchester County, MD, to plea for the Trump administration to release 64,000 more visas, the limit set by Congress on how many can be added.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has temporarily raised the cap by as many as 30,000 workers in recent years to help meet business’ demands.
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Maybe the industry should try paying American workers better wages, they might find workers right on the Eastern Shore!
The business owners that use that less expensive, imported labor DO NOT pass that saving along to their customers….
Imagine that. Sick huh?
They screw the customers that ‘butter their bread’.
That is called Capitalism . Free enterprise. Can’t have it both ways .
A fool and his money soon part…
‘Crab Industry wants to hire more imported workers’
Black folks can’t sit, pick crabmeat, and sing negro spirituals anymore?
Statistics show that Latino workers that come to America on this visa do a wonderful job. Then, those Latinos that fulfill the requirements and find a way to become citizens are that portion of America that is the fastest growing entrepreneurial workforce. They find a niche, create their own business, jobs, employ their compadres and go about trying to live the American dream.
If we need them let them come and I think supply and demand will hammer out the pay scale.
In closing I have a need to say that obviously Stuart Bell doesn’t know how much he should be ashamed of himself for his comment, but the Cape Charles Mirror never should have printed that filth.
Agreed. Mr. Bell specializes in the short, ugly attack that adds nothing of value to the discussion and that serves only to display his ignorance. His comment should never have made the cut.
Bless your heart. I cooked sixty bushels of crabs a day for a picking house in the late 80’s. I listened to those women singing praises to The Lord. Why on earth would I be ashamed of the truth. You will get no political correctness from me.
Maybe you should find a quiet ‘safe space’ and spend some time with coloring books and play dough.
If you would like to discuss this further, leave a contact number and I will give you a call.
Bless your heart. I cooked around sixty bushels of crabs a day for a picking house in the late 80’s. I listened to those women, every day, singing praises to The Lord. Why on earth would I be ashamed of the truth. You will get no political correctness from me.
Maybe you should find a quiet ‘safe space’ and spend some time with coloring books and play dough.
If you would like to discuss this further, leave a contact number and I will give you a call.
I would love to see your “statistics” tracking seasonal workers like those being requested up to business founding. No such statistics exist, are made up crap by those who get rich off exploited immigrant labor (and cutting out more expensive American labor).
As to Mr Bell’s comments, certainly they may be offensive to many, but I respect his making them more than I respect your anti-democratic suggestion that he should be muzzled by the Mirror. Free expression is THE American value that we all need to support. To live in a free country, you need to have a thick skin.
Very well said!
Stuart Bell has experienced, i.e. lived a culture that many of the better bred and reared among us cannot fathom even existing, a circle of black women sitting around in a circle picking crab meat while singing gospel the way only they can sing it, and there was Stuart Bell in the background boiling crabs so they could have something to pick to make their living that day, and when he comments on something he actually experienced, my goodness, it is the end of the world, because of ******* WHAT?
Is that now a forbidden subject, to talk about black women singing gospel while picking crab meat on the Eastern Shore of Virginia because it is somehow racist and demeaning, as if picking crab were not honorable employment?
If so, I think that is simply stupid, and we should encourage Stuart Bell to talk more of those days as living history of what life in America was like before it became so ignorant.
“I may not agree with what you have to say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
That’s the America we used to be.
Kearn C SCHEMM, Paul Plante, and Publius Americanus
I thank you for your kind words. It is troubling to me to see EBT (welfare, wic, food stamps, public assistance Call it as you Will) given out, monthly, and labor being imported for a vote. Political Correctness is being used to cover those tracks. You cannot talk about race, in this country, today without raw nerves getting plucked. Things will not get better until those nerves are tucked back in and their skin is thickened. White guilt and liberal politics have coddled people of color to a point of nauseum. They want people to be colorblind but never let us forget the color of their skin. Women do the same thing. They do not wish to be seen as a woman, just humans….but never let us forget they are women. For example first black this or first woman that, black entertainment channels, woman’s entertainment channel) they never let you forget they are colored or female. There is no shame in picking crabs. I am still amazed when I think back at their skill and agility. I see lots of shell in commercial crab meat today, I now understand why.
As for me, I am unashamed. God Bell you all and these United States of America.
There is NO SHAME to picking crabs, Stuart Bell, so why do people who are so self-righteous you can’t be in the same room with them attach shame to it because it was done by “colored” women, when to them it is **** work they would never think of their women doing, which is why I guess they see something wrong with your story, because it somehow embarrasses them, as if those gospel singing black women would be somehow offended by how well they could sing, as well as how good they could pick crabs.
One thing you can say for sure is that the Cape Charles Mirror has opened up the world to us poor folk out in the country who have shoveled a lot of ****, because if you got animals, and you care for them, it has to be done, and they sure as hell won’t do it if they got you around to do it for them, from those who can to those who need, as to just how big the world really is and how many different types of people there really are in it.
Kind of like on on-line version of that intergalactic bar Whoopie Goldberg ran on some TV show about some kind of space station that was like Grand Central Station with people coming from all over the universe and passing through, which I thought led to some real strange sounding conversations, kind of like what we find in here.
And when it is cold during the winter and the wolves are roaming, we find it grand entertainment as a way to make it though the winter with our intellectual wits still intact as opposed to being rotted away by cabin fever, which is going to be happening to a lot of self-quarantined people in these next couple of weeks, especially if they have no food.
Chaos is coming.
It will be starvation carrying people off, especially in New York City where the city is quite literally shutting down with people told to stay in for two weeks.
With everything shutting down, there will be no way to feed whatever 10 million people are down there.
DHS Halts Bringing More H-2B Foreign Workers to U.S. amid Opposition
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/02/dhs-halts-bringing-more-h-2b-foreign-workers-to-u-s-amid-opposition/