FISHING CREEK -For nearly 20 years, this tiny watermen's village on Hoopers Island has been enlivened each spring by the arrival of several dozen Mexicans - women who bring with them tortillas and tamales, mariachi music and the hands that make the local economy go.
They do the dirty work of Maryland's seafood industry, spending long days picking the premium lump meat out of the blue crab - work that the men who run the seafood processing plants that dot the island say Americans won't do. To hear them tell it, the foreigners have meant the difference between life and death for the generations-old businesses on which the 500 or so year-round residents rely.
But this year, the crab houses could stay closed.
Amid growing demand for temporary guest workers nationwide, only one of Maryland's 21 seafood processing plants was able to get visas to bring the foreigners into the country this year. If Congress does not move quickly to make more available, other processors say they won't open this spring. And the loss of a year's income, several say, means that they probably would shut their businesses for good.
"We just don't have no work force," said Jay L. Newcomb, who employed 30 of the guest workers at the A.E. Phillips & Son Inc. crab house in Fishing Creek last year. "We're going to be out of business if we don't have no pickers."
With Maryland's seafood industry constrained by new state limits on the crab harvest, Newcomb and others say, a season without pickers would devastate not only Hoopers Island but the Eastern Shore. Fishing Creek boatbuilder Phillip L. Jones called the crab houses the "backbone" of the industry, the most important link in a chain that runs from the watermen to the restaurants, from the equipment suppliers to the retail customers.
"They've got to get those workers," Jones said. "Dorchester County will look like a ghost town if they don't."
The H2B visa program allows foreigners to come to the United States for several months to work in a seasonal industry, such as crab picking or landscaping. When the season is over, the workers go home.
In years past, Congress has allowed businesses that were shut out of the visas to bring back employees who worked for them in previous years. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who created the so-called returning worker exemption four years ago, introduced legislation yesterday that would revive it.
