At Cowart Seafood in Lottsburg, Virginia the sound of slurping oysters is the sound of bipartisanship. The community here is waiting as Democrats and Republicans from Virginia, Alaska, Maryland, Louisiana and North Carolina are taking on the problematic H-2B visa for temporary foreign workers.
A.J. Erskine, Vice President of Cowart Seafood, has been lobbying Congress for years. "We have a new bill that Sen. Kaine along with four Republican Senators and four Democratic Senators that are on this bipartisan bill, Save Our Seafood Act. And that will exempt the seafood processing industry from counting against the H-2B cap," Erskine says.
The cap allows 66,000 temporary workers into the U.S. It pits the seafood industry against the landscaping industry, which gets the most visas in a lottery system.
When seafood processors don’t have enough workers, there’s a domino effect right down to the watermen and women like Monica Schenemann. "My buyer would sell to a picking house to pick those crabs for the crabmeat to get to the stores," Schenemann explains. "When it gets towards the fall, we’ve lost our market because we’ve lost our picking houses."
Save Our Seafood Act, introduced by Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, is modeled after a law that exempts fish roe processors from the cap.
Virginia Senator Tim Kaine is a cosponsor. "Just take that and expand it a little bit. So, the idea of a small change that doesn’t make everyone else rush in and say, 'I’ve got to get what I want,' that’s been the challenge. It’s easier to slightly expand something that’s already in law than to put something new in. So we’re hoping," Kaine says.
That hope needs to attach itself to a bill that has a chance of being voted out of both the House and Senate and becoming law.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.