BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS – The Texas shrimp industry is facing a worker shortage as a result of the federal cap on U.S. visas for immigrant seasonal workers.
Andrea Hance, executive director of the Texas Shrimp Association, told the Brownsville Herald that an estimated 70 percent of the Brownsville-Port Isabel shrimp fleet is starting off this season short-handed. The shrimp industry relies heavily on workers with H-2B visas, which are U.S. visas for temporary nonagricultural workers. A decades-old law limits the number of such visas to 66,000 for the whole country.
Congress failed to renew a cap exemption this year for returning workers, creating a worker shortage. The Labor Department last year released an additional 15,000 H-2B visas through a lottery, but it fell short of covering the workers needed for this shrimp season.
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