WashPost: Trump Curbs on H-2B Outsourcing immediately Boost Americans’ Wages

Employers are raising wages for Americans in the crab-meat business because of President Donald Trump’s opposition to the H-2B blue-collar outsourcing program, the Washington Post admits.
The good news about supply-and-demand is hidden by the Post‘s reporter amid threats from business executives and laments from excluded Mexican workers. The 22nd paragraph of the article, which is headlined “‘Please come help’: Eastern Shore crab houses are suffering this summer because they didn’t get the visas needed to hire enough pickers from Mexico” says:

[Business-owner Aubrey] Vincent has upped starting wages — she pays $9.60 an hour, plus $4.50 for each pound of crabmeat picked — and partnered with a temp agency in nearby Cambridge, Md., to try to recruit local workers. Of 60 applicants, only a handful were hired and stayed on …

Eden Park, an Eastern Shore native who works the docks for Lindy’s, said he has been clocking hours six days a week this summer to help the business keep up with demand.

He used to work alongside eight H2-B workers. But this year, there are none with him on the docks. In addition to unloading bushels of crabs, or driving a truck in from town, he is also contacting customers, delivering crabs, grading them, loading trucks, making sure those trucks depart, and refueling and washing the vehicles when they come back in.

“My responsibilities got astronomically a lot larger,” he said.

The Post article plays up employer Harry Phillips, who complains that he was caught short when the landscaping and forestry industry snatched up the 66,000 H-2B visa-workers, leaving him with no visas to import the Mexican women he normally uses to pull crabmeat out of crabs:

All I got to do in Mexico is put up a building. I got people there to run the plant and also pick the crabs.

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