In the Louisiana bayous, spring is peak season for crawfish—an ingredient in backyard boils and dishes like étouffée, and a centerpiece of local pride. But operators say the seasonal work that powers the industry’s supply chain has been disrupted by a shortfall of foreign guest workers who typically help shell and freeze the harvest.
Alan Lawson, who runs a crawfish production facility in Crowley, said the businesses rely on guest workers and that this year they could not get enough of them. “People have built businesses around these workers and this year we can’t get them,” Lawson said. “This industry would not exist without it because the American people don’t want to do the jobs we’re offering.”
Large-scale crawfish producers, including Lawson’s operation, use H-2B visa guest workers—many from Mexico and Central America—to shell and freeze the freshwater catch pulled from swampy rice fields. The workers are hired for nonfarming jobs and allowed to stay in the U.S. for less than a year after businesses first offer the jobs to Americans, according to the process described by the industry and federal program administrators.
Producers and state officials pointed to delays in how the Trump administration handled supplemental H-2B visas this season. The Department of Homeland Security is required to release 66,000 H-2B visas each year and can release nearly double that amount, and the process this year happened later than usual, according to the AP account. DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the Department of Labor said it “has been actively engaging with industry stakeholders to help address workforce needs and identify workable solutions.”
Even if additional guest workers arrive before the season ends around June, Lawson said the damage is already done. Restaurant owners and processors warned that limited access to labor could affect crawfish prices for consumers, who are already contending with affordability pressures.
The Labor Department’s own data, as described in the report, shows U.S. businesses have been seeking tens of thousands more guest workers than the federal government has made available, and the shortage adds to broader labor-market strain on seasonal employers. Andy Brown, a public policy coordinator for the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation, said “The demand is there but the supply is not” and added that the businesses want to use legal pathways for workers.
Lawson said his facility typically relies on more than 100 foreign workers during most seasons for peeling and packaging thousands of pounds of crawfish. He said that none were allowed to come this season. He also described how the federal supplemental-visa timeline and caps left the industry without the workforce it needed.
Louisiana officials said the federal government rejected some crawfish producers’ applications because they listed start dates before January. Louisiana agriculture officials also said at least 15 of the state’s 20 major crawfish processing plants had no guest workers this year. Mike Strain, a Republican agriculture commissioner, said the Trump administration’s indifference to the industry’s plight was “unacceptable.”
Processors said that despite advertising locally for months, only a handful of Americans had turned up for seasonal work paying around $13 an hour. David Savoy said he “can’t put the crawfish somewhere else” because the processing has to happen at the right time, describing the physical strain of peeling crawfish for long hours until workers’ hands hurt.
Immigration law experts said the labor shortage reflected what they described as a broader lack of prioritization for facilitating legal immigration. Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, said there was “much less of a push to facilitate legal immigration” and that it was “not a high priority to make sure that the immigration system is moving smoothly.”
Restaurant owners and crawfish lovers, the report said, could be affected through both availability and price. Chandra Chifici, who owns the New Orleans seafood restaurant Deanie’s, said she was worried companies would not be able to stockpile enough Louisiana crawfish to get through the offseason, noting that tourists come to the city for the dishes.