Louisiana's crawfish industry feels the pinch of limits on foreign workers
CROWLEY, La. (AP) — Spring is peak season in Louisiana for crawfish, the hard-shelled star of outdoor parties. But a shortage of foreign workers is dampening the mood.
Deep in Louisiana’s bayous, where crawfish production is a $300 million industry that is a key ingredient for backyard boils and buttery etouffees served in New Orleans’ French Quarter, operators are fuming over labor struggles and pointing fingers at President Donald Trump’s administration over what they say has been a failure to authorize enough guest foreign workers.
The shortages add to a list of industries in the U.S. that rely on seasonal foreign labor, including landscaping and construction, whose struggle to fill jobs has been exacerbated during the Trump administration’s wider clampdown on legal avenues for immigration. In Louisiana, the need for crawfish workers has strained an industry that is a symbol of state pride and frustrated Republican officeholders, many of whom broadly support Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda but say their pleas for more legal laborers have gone unanswered.
“People have built businesses around these workers and this year we can’t get them,” said Alan Lawson, who runs a crawfish production facility in the rural town of Crowley. “This industry would not exist without it because the American people don’t want to do the jobs we’re offering.”
https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-immigrant-crawfish-h2b-7d12d022e0304770395456d27d46a722
Trump needs a bucket of crawfish dumped down his pants to he can feel a real pinch.
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