Many Maryland Crab Houses Expect To Go Without Immigrant Workers This Summer After Again Losing Visa Lottery
June 21, 2018 | 1 min to read
Many Eastern Shore crab houses hoping for a lucky break from the federal government are instead now expecting to remain mostly idle through the summer, without laborers to do the painstaking work needed to produce tubs of jumbo lump meat.
In a lottery held this month, U.S. immigration officials approved visa applications for only one of those “picking houses,” where smaller crabs are processed for meat sold in restaurants and grocery stores.
Most of the rest of the family-owned seafood businesses in the Dorchester County community of Hoopers Island were again denied workers through a visa program that is seeing surging demand across the country. The H-2B visas were awarded by lottery for the first time this year because of the overwhelming interest from landscapers, pool-cleaning companies and golf course managers.
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