BATON ROUGE — The crawfish industry is facing a labor shortage due to federal immigration caps as the state enters the start of the harvesting season, Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain said in a House committee meeting on Tuesday.
Most of the seasonal workers employed by the state’s crawfish peeling and packing facilities are authorized to work temporarily in the U.S., and this year, many of them are being denied visas to work, leaving the packing facilities without a workforce and causing a few to close their doors for the season.
“My personal constituent had to close four other locations and only can operate one because he can’t get the workers that he normally has no problem getting,” Rep. Dodie Horton, R-Bossier, told Strain in the hearing.
The issue is not a shortage in those wanting work, but rather federal quotas, Strain said.
Under the federal H-2B program, immigrants can apply to work seasonal, non-agricultural jobs in the country before returning home at the end of the season, and many of the state’s crawfish factories utilize the program. But there is a cap on the allotted visas, and Louisiana reached it before the factories could be fully staffed.
Because of a demonstrated need, the cap was extended from 66,000 to include an additional 35,000 supplemental visas, distributed to employers on a lottery basis. However, a couple of the packing facilities were still left without employees, according to Doug Guillory, owner of Riceland Crawfish, a seafood wholesaler in Eunice, one of the few facilities to make it under the cap.
While this shortage is not expected to have a significant effect on the supply and cost of live and boiled crawfish in the state, producers are anticipating a drop in domestic production of frozen crawfish tails shipped around the country, which may affect the rest of the industry, Strain said.
The impact of the labor shortage on the price of peeled and frozen Louisiana crawfish tails is not immediately clear.
In the past when domestic factories have been unable to keep up with peeling and packaging, the crawfish have either gone unconsumed or have been sent to Mexico to be peeled and packed and sold in America.
Strain said he has reached out to national leaders, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the Department of Labor, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, to find a workaround for the cap, but he has been told there is nothing they can do.
“That’s unacceptable – this whole process has gotten now totally out of hand,” Strain said.
Despite numerous letters, emails and phone calls to federal officials, Strain has seen no progress in tweaking the visa process. According to Horton, Gov. Jeff Landry, Sen. John Kennedy and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have addressed the issue with federal agencies, but no new answers have been found.
“I’m going to find out what desk it is stuck on in Washington, and I’m going to find out why,” Strain said.
The state’s packaging facilities struggle to find labor in the country, which pushes them to employ through H-2B in the first place, and that struggle still exists, Strain said.
“Overall, our deal is, it costs a lot more for them because they have to provide housing, transportation,” Strain said. “It’s all a cost to get them in. It’s very expensive for these workers, but they are the only option in town.”
Despite the lack of answers, Strain suggested that legislators add an amendment to the next budget reconciliation bill in order to allow crawfish facilities to bring in more employees.
“They’re very valuable, but these are skilled workers, and right now we cannot get them, and it’s very frustrating,” Strain said.
