‘I’m not here to take anyone’s job’: Mexican crab pickers quietly work in Maryland as immigration debate rages

The laborers describe the surrounding Chesapeake Bay and Honga River as “beautiful” but intimidating. The water laps up against narrow causeways, and flooding and erosion are constant concerns. From some island vantage points, the water is visible on three sides.

Hoopers Island has limited development and poor cellphone reception, and “a lot of the women talk about it as the land that time left behind,” said Thurka Sangaramoorthy, a cultural and medical anthropologist at the University of Maryland who has studied immigration here and elsewhere on the Eastern Shore.

The workers, Sangaramoorthy said, “are often living in these really cramped quarters with women they don’t know. They sleep during these odd times and hours. It’s not your normal cycle of a day.”

Lacking cars, the laborers rarely leave Hoopers except for grocery shopping and church visits. Most seldom stray from the picking plants and their living quarters, which are sometimes housed in the same structure.

“A lot of the Hispanic people are afraid of going to certain stores because there are some people who look at them disapprovingly,” said Margarita Marquez, an outreach worker at St. Mary Refuge of Sinners Catholic church in Cambridge. “But they know how to avoid those situations.”

The workers have almost no social contact with the locals in Dorchester County, a conservative, water-oriented community that is the birthplace of abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman.

“We run into them at the general store, the post office,” said Mary Jo Bosley, a retiree who lives on Hoopers Island. While those encounters are cordial, she said, there is little further socializing. “Part of it is because they work so hard,” she said.

Dorchester County State’s Attorney William H. Jones is among those who worry that in their isolation, the women could be targets for robbers or other assailants — and he is mindful that the foreign workers might feel afraid to report any crime.

Jones said he hears periodically about “street robberies and things like that” against the laborers and others in the Latino population.

Some who know the workers said they have heard about incidents of abuse in the past, though women interviewed by The Baltimore Sun said they’d not had any problems.

Marquez, the church liason, and other advocates say they try to look out for the visitors.

But it’s a challenge, Jones said, to advocate for a community that is wary of outsiders and determined not to complain or cause trouble for their employers.

“They’re very much a part of the community, but at the same time they’re not,” he said.

‘Get me a Band-Aid’

Commercial crab picking is painstaking work. There is no talking, and the pace never slows.

At Lindy’s Seafood, where Vazquez and Garcia work, shifts may begin at 2 a.m. They run up to 10 hours, depending on the volume of crabs, with a one-hour lunch break. Then those few dozen workers sleep, and a new shift arrives.

Before a typical stint, Vazquez rises from one of three bunk beds in the air-conditioned bedroom she shares with five other women. On the walls are butterfly decals and pictures of her kids, including one of her son with Santa Claus.

Vazquez heard about the program from other workers and a local recruiter in Ciudad del Maíz, the central Mexico municipality where she lives. She and her co-workers are largely beholden to others — to middlemen who recruit them in Mexico, to the American employers who hire them, and to the U.S. government, which must approve their visas.

Last spring’s trip to Maryland involved several days of bus rides and a six-hour processing wait at the border town of Nuevo Laredo. “We leave our kids and they’re so young, so it’s really difficult to talk about,” Vazquez said. “Sometimes you lie. You have to tell your children, you know, ‘It’ll just be a few days.’ ”

Before heading for work, she pushes her hair into a bun and places a white hairnet and a ball cap on her head. She packs a lunch, a pair of gloves and two small crab picking knives, then walks down a narrow road a quarter-mile to work.

Inside the plant — a squat, white cinder block building — the crabs are wheeled in on a dolly the size of a small dumpster, then placed in piles on a long, stainless steel tables for picking.

The gloved workers crack the shells and quickly maneuver their knives, piling the meat into small plastic containers marked with numbers to identify how much each laborer extracted.

The only sound — save occasionally for Spanish-language music — is a constant rustling as the knives work and the shells are cracked. Some workers can finish picking a crab in 30 seconds.

“You’re going so fast that you’re bound to cut your hand, and it hurts because the crabmeat is salty,” Vazquez said. “The juice of the crab goes into your cut and it burns like someone is putting lime on your cuts. I’ll say, ‘Martha, go get me a Band-Aid.’ ”

When she returns to Mexico, she says, her kids say she smells like crabs.

Visa shortages

Visa shortages have been a problem for the seafood industry since the last generations of Eastern Shore women who once picked crabmeat aged out of the work several decades ago.

Many of the blue crabs sold in Maryland come from the Carolinas or Louisiana, and some meat comes from Asia or Venezuela. But a premium is placed on local meat, with a state program called “True Blue” to identify and market Maryland crabs.

Selling crabmeat to supermarkets and restaurants is particularly profitable for Eastern Shore plants. Selling crabs whole usually yields far less money.

In the 1980s, crab houses started bringing workers from Mexico.

“We need the H-2B program,” said former Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, who championed the program before retiring at the end of 2016. “It protects American jobs like our seafood industry. It rewards people who go by the rules.”

But last year, changes to the program left crab processing plants in Dorchester County teetering on the precipice, with half of the county’s eight picking houses unable to secure enough visas.

Without enough pickers, family businesses such as Lindy’s “had a lot of conversations that were really scary about how are we going to get through this,” said sales manager Aubrey Vincent. She said Lindy’s — which usually has annual sales of about $9 million to $10 million — had to unload many crabs whole instead of selling their meat to restaurants and grocery stores much more profitably. Selling crabs whole usually yields at least 50 percent less money.

“It really, really hurt us,” Vincent said. “I was down 50 to 60 percent in production and sales revenue in 2018.”

Other plants also reported revenues being cut nearly in half, and Dorchester’s economy felt the effects.

“It’s a big loss when we can’t have [the workers],” said Susan Banks, the county’s director of economic development.

In Dorchester — which Trump won handily in the 2016 election — some crab plant owners questioned whether the president was committed to the program.

“If he’s supportive, why didn’t he make a phone call [last year] to release extra workers?” said Newcomb, the Old Salty’s owner.

The Department of Homeland Security says decisions on increasing the program’s visas are made after balancing the needs of businesses with any impact on U.S. workers. Businesses must establish not only that they can’t get enough U.S. workers, but that employing foreign laborers won’t lower the wages and working conditions of domestic help.

This year, the plants said they got enough visas but remain concerned because they believe the program has gotten caught up in the administration’s efforts to tighten immigration policies.

The department recently said it plans to switch in future years to a random selection process — essentially a lottery system— that some fear could again leave the plants without enough workers.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen next year,” said Bill Seiling, executive vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. "It’s always been a program that has been hanging on by a thin thread. It’s not just the Trump administration.”

‘I hope my kids understand’

When they’re not working or sleeping, the workers watch Spanish-language soap operas in the houses they share or play on their phones.

Often, they talk to their children in Mexico on video apps that don’t always function because of poor cell signals or lackluster Wi-Fi.

“For the most part we really don’t have any time,” said Garcia, the Lindy’s worker who first entered the program at a Virginia plant 29 years ago.

“We’re always working. We even work Saturdays. The only day we take off is Sunday when they take us out to buy groceries," she said. "If I have the opportunity, I go to Mass on Sundays.”

Staying busy is a salve of sorts because it blocks out the yearning to be back with their families. It is for them that Garcia, Vazquez and the others endure the separation year after year, earning money that in a rural Mexican village might pay for food all winter or finance such luxuries as an indoor bathroom. Garcia, who lives in a small city, said she has used the income to pay for her three daughters’ education.

“I hope my kids understand one day why I do this,” Vazquez said, “and why I have to be away.”