In Louisiana, where crawfish production is a $300 million industry, operators are fuming over labor struggles and pointing fingers at President Donald Trump’s administration over what they say has been a failure to authorize enough guest foreign workers.
The shortages add to a list of industries in the U.S. that rely on seasonal foreign labor, including landscaping and construction, whose struggle to fill jobs has been exacerbated during the Trump administration’s wider clampdown on legal avenues for immigration. In Louisiana, the need for crawfish workers has strained an industry and frustrated Republican officeholders, many of whom broadly support Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda but say their pleas for more legal laborers have gone unanswered.
“People have built businesses around these workers and this year we can’t get them,” says Alan Lawson, who runs a crawfish production facility in the rural town of Crowley. “This industry would not exist without it because the American people don’t want to do the jobs we’re offering.”
Large-scale crawfish producers use guest workers, many from Mexico and Central America, to shell and freeze the freshwater catch that is often pulled from swampy rice fields. They are hired on H-2B visas for nonfarming jobs and are allowed to stay in the U.S. for less than a year after businesses first offer the jobs to Americans.
The Department of Homeland Security is required to release 66,000 H-2B visas each year and can release nearly double that amount. But that process happened later than usual this year—after Louisiana’s crawfish season had already begun.
DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Department of Labor says it respects the crawfish industry and importance to the U.S. economy, and that the agency “has been actively engaging with industry stakeholders to help address workforce needs and identify workable solutions.”
Read the full story from the Associated Press.
