August 20, 2018
This is one of the main items in a Washington Post article on the Maryland crab industry. While the gist of the piece is that many of the crab packagers on Maryland’s eastern shore are struggling because they can’t get enough workers as a result of a reduction in the number H2-B visas available, the piece says that the crabbers have increased wages in order to attract more workers.
If the point of the limiting immigration in this sector was to raise wages, then the limits seem to have been successful, according to the evidence presented in the piece. It is entirely possible that some crabbers will go out of business as a result. That is the way capitalism works. Businesses that can’t make a profit paying the prevailing wage go under. This is the reason that the country has only a tiny fraction of the number of family farms that it did a century ago.
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