With Lent in full gear for many in Louisiana, crawfish are looking like a hot commodity. However, if you’re looking for some of your favorite crawfish-centered dishes in the coming months, there might be some stress involved.
Mike Strain, Commissioner of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, says peeled crawfish tail meat could be hard to come by this season if things remain as they are. There have been recent problems with getting the amount of migrant workers needed to actually peel the crawfish harvest once it's brought in. "I don't want to throw any cold water on the crawfish season, but we're having trouble getting our workers in. That would be our H2B guest workers, which means they have to be skilled guest workers. Many plants are trying to open up with only half of their workers," Strain noted.
Strain says the current issues when it comes to retaining skilled migrant workers and those workers being able to attain the visas they actually need to work in the United States are a tremendous problem. That can lead to some fairly strange measures being taken to get peeled, locally caught crawfish distributed across Louisiana. "If we don't have those workers, in the past we've had to put our local crawfish in tractor-trailors, bring them to Mexico to get them peeled, then bring them back to Louisiana the same way. We don't want to do that," the Agriculture Commissioner emphasized. That's an elaborate (and somewhat ironic) workaround to actually hiring migrant workers on-site.
While there has been backlash against using migrant workers, Strain pointed out that it's mostly due to a lack of interest in actually doing the work from Americans. "Any American is offered these jobs first. Only then can guest workers be hired. And these are not low-paying jobs. They make $15-$18 an hour," he explains. "The migrant workers work for about six months, then they go home. But, by the time you pay for their housing and transportation, it ends up at about $25 an hour. They would gladly hire Americans, but there just aren't enough of them that will actually do that work," Strain went on to say.
Strain blames the currently heated political climate and harsh rhetoric surrounding the use of migrant workers for the stress being felt by the crawfish industry in Louisiana. "Unfortunately, it gets tied into the immigration battles as a bargaining chip. This is ridiculous. It's hurting our economy for no reason. It all gets tied up in Washington politics and enough is enough," added Strain. However, the Louisiana Agriculture Commissioner did add that he's hopeful some type of compromise can be worked out in the near future. Until that actually happens, uncertainty will remain.