Brownsville Herald by STEVE CLARK 7/14/2018
The Texas shrimp industry is celebrating a handful of recent legislative wins while also dreading next year’s shrimp season if changes aren’t made to the seasonal foreign worker visa program.
The Brownsville-Port Isabel shrimp fleet starts this season, which opens today, without enough workers. Andrea Hance, executive director of the Texas Shrimp Association, estimates that 70 percent of the fleet’s 140 trawlers will head out to the Gulf shorthanded.
--- Most of the Texas shrimp industry’s H-2B workers come from Mexico. The cap on H-2B visas is 66,000 per fiscal year, split evenly between the first and last half of the year.
With more than 200,000 applications from employers for H-2B visas this year, the cap isn’t cutting it, Hance said.---
More:
https://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/local/shrimp-industry-fears-worker-shortage/article_6eea0fc4-7dc3-5da5-817c-162e02a1c361.html
