Shrimpers won’t get new workers for 3-4 weeks


Jason Hoekema
Employees talk in the shade on a shrimp-boat, Thursday, March 30, 2017, at the shrimp basin in Brownsville, Texas. Other crew-members have not been able to return for the coming shrimp season after Congress allowed the lapse of H-2B, creating a shortage of boat crews. The program allowed employers to temporarily hire foreign workers for seasonal work, like working aboard a shrimp boar during the Texas fishing season. (Jason Hoekema/The Brownsville Herald)


Posted: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 10:07 pm
By STEVE CLARK | Staff Writer

The Department of Homeland Security announced July 17 that it would approve 15,000 additional H-2B visas in response to heavy lobbying by various sectors, including the Texas shrimp industry.

The Brownsville-Port Isabel shrimp fleet, along with the rest of the state’s industry, has been scrambling to find enough workers to crew trawlers since Congress last year failed to renew the H-2B “returning worker exemption,” which waived the cap for H-2B foreign workers who came back to the same jobs each year.

As a result, fisheries, landscape companies and the hospitality industry have struggled to fill positions normally filled during the busy season by foreign workers.

The Texas shrimp season reopened July 15, and boats are already in the Gulf of Mexico. Even so, most fleet owners have submitted applications for some of the newly released 15,000 visas even though it will be three or four weeks, once the paperwork is done, before they actually get any workers, said Texas Shrimp Association Executive Director Andrea Hance.

That’s because, one, boats are still short crew members and, two, if they don’t apply Homeland Security may assume next time around that they didn’t really need more H-2B workers after all, she said.

“I think just about everybody went ahead and applied for those,” Hance said. “The problem is that if we don’t apply for them, that could come back and bite us in the future.”

A condition of being able to hire foreign H-2B workers is that the applicants — shrimp boat owners in this case — have to advertise the jobs to U.S. residents. Noting that life on a shrimp boat for 30 to 45 days at a stretch is tough and dangerous work, Hance said few U.S. citizens respond to the ads, and those who are hired either don’t show up or quit right away.

The Texas shrimp industry hired about 200 U.S. citizens for the current season, she said. Hance said her best estimate is that, during the first week of the season, half of the 100 or so U.S. workers hired by the local shrimp fleet quit and had to be taken back to the mainland.

sclark@brownsvilleherald.com

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