Phillips ordinarily hires more than 90 foreigners each summer to prepare food and wash dishes at its three locations in Ocean City - jobs that assistant general manager Sean Bryan says Americans don't want. The law requires employers to advertise openings locally before hiring foreigners.
Without any H2B workers this year, the local chain is delaying the opening of its oldest and largest restaurant, the 52-year-old Phillips Crab House, by three weeks.
Bryan says the decision will cost Phillips tens of thousands of dollars in business. When the season does begin, he says, he will have to turn to foreign students, eligible to work under a different program.
"You know, it will make it a lot harder on us," he said. "The H2B workers, we have some that have worked here for up to 10 years. They come back each season. Whereas those students, they're here for a year; if we're lucky, they'll come back a second year. So we lose all that experience."
The H2B program has its critics. Some immigration opponents object to the reliance on foreign workers. Some union leaders say cheap foreign labor depresses domestic wages.
But Douglas Lipton, a resource economist at the University of Maryland, says the workers contribute to the broader economy. In a study of the Eastern Shore seafood processing industry, he concluded that between the money they spend and the labor they contribute while they are here, each H2B crab picker creates about 2 1/2 American jobs.
"Those plants are at a threat of survival if they can't get the workers," Lipton said. "These crab meat industries will essentially go away."
Crab-picking houses in Virginia and North Carolina have closed for want of the H2B workers. Brooks, who says he employed about 45 American workers last year in addition to 90 foreigners, warns of the impact that such closures in Maryland would have on "the whole economic network of the fishery," from the watermen to the truck drivers to the markets.
"We're getting desperate to save this year's season for a lot of folks," he said.
matthew.brown@baltsun.com
