Joined at the Claw

By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 5, 2007; A01

CAMBRIDGE, Md. -- Jack Brooks tried hiring prisoners just out of jail. He sent a bus to Baltimore to pick up workers from an unemployment center. He recruited high school dropouts at vocational schools. Anything to keep his century-old family business running.

But if Marylanders regard the crabbing life as the state at its most real and romantic, hardly anyone wants a dirty, smelly, hand-gouging job that keeps you in a metal chair up to nine hours a day, lasts only eight months a year and pays about $15,000 for the season.

So now this 56-year-old man -- whose thumbnails, crushed by crab claws, bear witness to his labor -- spends his time filling out forms and sending notarized documents to federal agencies for permission to bring Mexicans to steam and pick crabs at his family's J.M. Clayton Seafood.

He is one of the people at the heart of the debate in Washington over a proposal to expand the ranks of foreign workers as part of a wholesale reworking of immigration law. So is Olga Gonzales, one of the 100 Mexicans working for him.

They are unlikely partners.

Brooks was born and schooled on Maryland's Eastern Shore, on the banks of the Choptank River. He drives through the cobbled streets of Cambridge and smiles as he calls out a "How are you?" to Sissy Jones, one of about a dozen local residents who still pick crabs for his family, as did her mother and aunt before her.

All he can say to Gonzales and his other Mexican employees is hola. All they know of his community is the aging Clayton Seafood crab house with its white walls and cold cement floor, weekly trips to Wal-Mart, Saturday night mass at St. Mary Refuge of Sinners, and watching the one Spanish television station in the rickety rental homes they share.

Yet Brooks and Gonzales are bound by the global economy. One in need of work. The other in search of laborers.

If Gonzales had her druthers, she would toil in Mexico, sticking close to her 4-year-old daughter and elderly parents.

"If you don't come here, you don't eat in Mexico," she says matter-of-factly after a full day of picking crabs.

If Brooks had his, he would employ Americans.

"I don't want to deal with this bureaucracy," Brooks said. "Every year, we are vulnerable. . . . This is not my perfect world, but this is what keeps us going."

He has a lot riding on the immigration bill now before the Senate, which is the result of a tenuous compromise between powerful lawmakers and the Bush administration. The bill includes a patchwork of guest-worker provisions, among them boosting the seasonal-worker program Brooks uses. Legislators propose boosting the number of visas available to him and others in seasonal industries from 66,000 to 200,000, but Brooks and other employers think they may need even more.

Lawmakers could also vote to introduce a separate guest-worker program, giving nonseasonal businesses access to 200,000 two-year visas that could be renewed up to three times, but only after workers return to their home countries for a year each time.

It's all more bureaucracy than Brooks ever expected. His rusting metal desk is covered in a two-inch stack of papers -- applications to Maryland's Labor Department, the U.S. Labor Department and the Department of Homeland Security, along with a phone number for a foreign-labor recruiter in Charlottesville who through a contact in Mexico notifies the seasonal workers that their visas are ready.

The company began importing workers in 1997, but his father first saw the local workforce wane in the 1970s. By the 1980s, Brooks's dad and two friends invented an intricate crab-picking machine. But only the human hand can delicately pull out the two premium lumps. In the early 1990s, the crabbers lost a generation of local pickers to a booming health-care industry, big-box retailers and a deluxe 400-room Hyatt resort on the edge of town.

Just a few years ago, the government's seasonal-worker program -- known for its legislative designation, H-2B -- was rarely used by the industries to which it is available, said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, employers hired illegal workers with near impunity because the federal government rarely pursued such violations. Now it routinely cracks down on illegal hires. Still, he estimates, 800,000 illegal immigrants come to work in the United States annually, and half a million stay.

Brooks and other employers argue that the number of visas for guest workers should rise and fall on market demand. Two years ago, the government met its quota of 66,000 seasonal workers in only four months, and only a last-minute legislative change temporarily increased the size of the program.

He says he does not want to break the law. "I would rather shut down than hire illegal workers," he said.

Labor unions and some in the Democratic congressional majority worry that an expanded guest-worker program will depress wages and create an underclass of migrants with limited access to U.S. citizenship. A proposal to strip the Senate's immigration bill of the guest-worker program failed, but other amendments aimed at limiting access to guest workers are expected to be introduced this week.

"The idea that they can come for two years and must go home is just ludicrous," said Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents workers in many industries that would use an expanded guest-worker program. "We need to make sure that needs of our economy are met, but we also need to make sure that the needs of workers are met."

Brooks and his family try to welcome and orient the Mexican workers. The company owns five houses, which it rents to them for $35 a week per person. It picks up and drops off workers at the crab house each day and takes them on shopping excursions once a week. Brooks's son Clay, 28, who learned Spanish from the workers, acts as a translator.

Brooks is an affable man who enjoys talking for hours and chafes at not being able to chat with his workers. He has never set foot in Mexico, and he said he imagines that they are risk-takers to leave their homes to work for him.

As he walks by Gonzales, she works silently, thinking of her family in a small village surrounded by cornfields. The first time she boarded a bus in the bustling border town of Nuevo Laredo for Maryland was in 2004. She felt sick on the four-day trip to a place she had never heard of to do an unknown job.

She arrives at work at 6 a.m., pulls on a hairnet and plastic gloves, and starts with the crabs. She cracks the crustacean's back, removes its gills, cuts its legs at the knuckles and pulls out the thin meat that remains. Every hour and a half, she carries her tray of meat to scales that determine her pay. Most days, she is fast enough to make $12 an hour at peak season. She averages about $300 a week.

The wages are meager, Gonzales says, not enough to escape poverty. But without them, her daughter would go without shoes and milk and her parents without meat.

Brooks says he cannot afford to pay more. The local crabbing industry is under pressure from Southeast Asia. Maryland blue crabs once dominated the regional market, but their total value has dropped from $24.8 million in 1997 to $14 million last year, according to a study of Chesapeake Bay crab processors by University of Maryland associate professor Douglas Lipton, who researches costal and marine economics.

Lipton also found that each seasonal crab worker saved 2.5 local jobs. Without crab pickers, there would be less need for crabbers, distributors and drivers. Pretty soon, an entire culture and way of life is lost. Expensive waterside condos have already replaced most of the old crab houses in Cambridge.

"I'm a crab man. I'm not an economist. I'm not a lobbyist," Brooks says, picking a male crab out of a bushel with his bare hand as a group of Mexican men prepared to weigh the load. "A year without them, and we would lose all of our markets to competition from Southeast Asia. This is a good legal program that works."

It works, Gonzales agrees, but she is sad every day here.