Crab Processors Await Decision on Guest Worker Visas

For generations, the crab processors on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia have followed the same seasonal schedule: Winter is the time to do maintenance on the crab houses. Spring is when the first pickers arrive to take their place on the rows of metal chairs inside. By summer, they are cracking through the shells for nine hours at a stretch.

Now, fall has emerged as the season for a new, decidedly less traditional watermen's ritual: an annual lobbying frenzy to gain congressional renewal of a provision within the guest workers program that allows immigrants to return each year to pick crabs. The provision, which landscapers, pool cleaners, resort operators and other seasonal-business owners also rely on, has for the first time been allowed to expire amid criticism from immigrant advocates, whose challenge may successfully block the renewal.

A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center this year said guest workers are vulnerable to exploitation because they lack access to legal resources and are effectively bound to work for the employer who sponsors them. In interviews with thousands of guest workers, the center found that the laborers were routinely cheated out of wages, forced to live in squalid quarters, denied medical care for on-the-job injuries and required to pay exorbitant fees to recruiters in their home countries.

The provision, first adopted in May 2005, exempts returning workers from a cap of 66,000 on the number of unskilled temporary laborers allowed into the United States each year. The crabbers contend that without the exemption, they would have no hope of hiring the foreign workers who fill their picking lines: By the time crabbing season begins, all 66,000 permits for new workers have been snapped up by industries with earlier start dates.

With many in Congress adamantly opposed to increasing the number of foreigners allowed into the United States, the returning-worker exemption has never been an easy sell. But this fall's battle to renew it is proving the toughest yet.

On Sept. 30, for the first time since it was adopted, the provision expired before Congress voted to extend it. This year, longtime backers of the measure, such as Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.), also face mounting opposition from a new source: labor advocates concerned that the seasonal guest-worker program does not adequately protect workers' rights.

Sonia Ramirez, legislative lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, said her organization is pushing Democratic allies in Congress to pass a bill that would strengthen guest-worker protections.

Renewing the returning-worker exemption would essentially expand the seasonal guest-worker program, Ramirez said. "And before we get to a conversation about growing the program, we really need to address some of the fundamental flaws in the way it's being implemented."

Crabbers and owners of other small seasonal businesses fear that such proposals will get bogged down in controversy even as their industries reach the breaking point.

"It's horrible trying to stay in business and make plans for the future when you have to go through this uncertainty year after year," said Jack Brooks, owner of J.M. Clayton Seafood in Cambridge, Md.

Hiring U.S. workers is not an option, Brooks added. Since as far back as the 1970s, local pickers have been steadily leaving the business for year-round jobs in the area's burgeoning health-care, big-box retail and hotel industries that are better paying and less grueling. Crab pickers make about $15,000 per season. But the crab processors say they cannot afford to woo the pickers back with higher wages without losing market share to lower-priced imports from Latin America and Asia.

Area crabbers first hit on the seasonal worker program as a solution to their troubles in the mid-1990s. Known as H-2B after its legislative designation, the program enables businesses to bring workers in for eight months at a time if they can prove to the U.S. Department of Labor that no U.S. workers are available for the jobs and that they will be paying the prevailing wage or higher.

About 75 of the 120 workers whom Brooks employs at peak season are guest workers from Mexico. John B. Graham of Graham and Rollins in Hampton, Va., employs even more: 110 of his 120 workers are Mexican.

Even as he joins in the latest round of letter-writing, phone calls and visits to the Hill, Graham, 42, confessed that he is beginning to lose heart.

"I've always been very passionate about this business, being that it's been in my family for generations and that I've watched the industry shrink so much over the years," he said. "But honestly, I just don't have the get-up-and-go that I used to. If, even after all your hard work, you don't know how long you're going to be around, it's hard to remain passionate."