Foreign Workers

Maryland seafood processors, desperately short of hands to pick crabmeat, are rushing to apply for visas for foreign workers after the federal Department of Homeland Security declared Thursday that 25,000 seasonal immigration permits have gone unclaimed for this year. The unexpected discovery that some of the annual allocation of 66,000 seasonal worker visas were still available was a welcome relief for the operators of Eastern Shore crab "picking houses," some of which had remained shuttered when the season started in the spring because they could not find enough help.

A special visa program that has supplied Maryland's seafood industry with foreign workers is about to expire, and owners of crab-picking houses on the Eastern Shore say their livelihood is once again in jeopardy. The law that extended the H2B visa program, which has brought workers from Mexico and other countries to the Shore during the past decade, is set to expire tomorrow. While the thousands of workers already in Maryland will be able to stay until their seasonal jobs end in a month or two, they have no guarantee they'll be able to come back next year.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Call it what you will -- the Asian flu, meltdown, deflation. The financial turmoil that began in Thailand six months ago has spread and debilitated the tiger economies in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and rocked the financial markets in Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan.While the U.S. media remainfixated on what we Asians call America's "geisha" scandal in the White House, there is a human story imploding in Asia that could have a profound impact on our global village.

MICHIGAN SEN. Spencer Abraham proposed last week a sharp increase in the number of visas issued to highly skilled workers to help fill the shortage of computer analysts and programmers in the country.Now, there are available roughly 65,000 H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled workers to remain in the United States for up to six years. They are expected to run out by May.Under Abraham's plan, an additional 25,000 of the highly sought visas would be issued.But critics suggest that computer firms might use the introduction of foreign recruits to hold down salaries.

In a move aimed at protecting foreign workers and the environment, the Senate passed legislation yesterday that would ban the federal government from exporting old Navy and Maritime Administration ships to Third World nations.The prohibition, which was approved over the objections of the Clinton administration, is included in an appropriations bill that provides funding to the Environmental Protection Agency and more than a dozen other federal agencies.Lawmakers said the Senate vote was an important step in ensuring that obsolete government ships are not sold to South Asia, where worker-safety and environmental regulations are virtually nonexistent.

JAKARTA -- More than 200 Chinese refugees in leaky fishing boats found safety early last month on the beaches of one of Indonesia's more than 17,000 islands. They were not wanted here. Local authorities allowed the refugees to patch their craft, gave them some rice, and pushed them off, pointing in the general direction of New Zealand.At the same time, the government of Indonesia was, officially and unofficially, pressing Malaysia to accept hundreds of thousands of undocumented Indonesians illegally working or looking for work in Malaysia's Sabah Province in Borneo, an island divided between those two countries and the Sultanate of Brunei.

The General Accounting Office has thrown water on a legislative effort, pushed by the nation's agricultural employers, to allow entry of more foreign farm workers by concluding in a new report that there is "no national agricultural labor shortage at this time."Several farm industry associations are pressing to expand the number of temporary work visas for the so-called guest workers, arguing that some regions face labor shortages, which are bound to increase as immigration officials step up efforts to keep out, and send back, illegal aliens.

When Robert S. Forman needed someone to develop and manage a complex automated distribution system for IMI Systems Inc., a computer systems design company in New York, he scouted the globe for someone with the right expertise to launch the ambitious project.It turned out a British national with a European supermarket chain was the person Mr. Forman needed. The system was designed for an IMI client, and at the same time, Mr. Forman's company, now armed with innovative technology, scored an important leg up in the fiercely competitive information technology field.

HOD HASHARON, Israel -- Israel is on the verge of replacing virtually all its Palestinian workers with cheap foreign laborers, a key step toward the government's goal of segregating Arabs from Jews.The move is needed for Israel's security, the government says. But the imported workers bring problems of their own, while cutting off the chief source of wages for the Palestinian economy."For 28 years they have forced us to be attached to the Israeli economy, and now they say go find another job," complained Ra'ed Shedeh, 23, a Palestinian who now is barred from going the three miles from a Palestinian refugee camp to Jerusalem to look for work.

KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait -- At first look, life hums along here and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait five years ago seems a thing of the past.The emir is building a seashore palace that goes on for four or five blocks. The reinstated Parliament debates -- loudly -- all kinds of issues. And more than a few people are trying to buy that magical lingerie that, as the story goes, falls down when you clap your hands.Is Kuwait over the invasion blues?Not even close.The spirit of the invasion hovers over this place like the ferocious heat of summer, an almost suffocating force on the collective psyche.

Maryland seafood processors, desperately short of hands to pick crabmeat, are rushing to apply for visas for foreign workers after the federal Department of Homeland Security declared Thursday that 25,000 seasonal immigration permits have gone unclaimed for this year. The unexpected discovery that some of the annual allocation of 66,000 seasonal worker visas were still available was a welcome relief for the operators of Eastern Shore crab "picking houses," some of which had remained shuttered when the season started in the spring because they could not find enough help.

With the foreign workers who have long done the dirty work in Maryland's seafood industry held up by red tape, desperate owners of the Eastern Shore's processing plants are investigating a new source of crab pickers: state prisoners. This week, members of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association toured facilities - the women's prison in Jessup and the prerelease unit for women in Baltimore - to see whether there is a way to have inmates do the low-paying work, potentially saving one of the state's signature industries.

Too few workers for seasonal jobs If Ross Eisenbrey's column were their only source of information on the shortage of American workers in seasonal positions, Sun readers might think that the seasonal worker crisis is simply a concoction of greedy, self-centered, anti-American ogres led by fancy-dressed Gucci-loafered lobbyists ("Fairness shortage," Commentary, May 2). Nothing could be further from the truth. The issue faced by seafood processors in Maryland and Virginia, hotel and restaurant owners from Cape Cod to Colorado, pool management operators throughout the northern half of the country, and other businesses in many corners of our country is simple: Despite our nonstop efforts to hire Americans for full-time seasonal positions, there are not enough Americans who want to come to work for us. The visa we have been forced to turn to in an effort to find workers is the H-2B.

With unemployment rising, hundreds of thousands of American families facing foreclosures on their homes, and wages flat-lining (especially for workers without college degrees), the nation needs ... more workers who are willing to accept low wages and are less likely to organize or otherwise assert their rights. That's what a well-funded business coalition, with well-connected lobbyists, is telling Congress. Many members of the U.S. House and Senate - including Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland - are listening attentively and getting ready to give these low-wage employers just what they want.

Patricia Loughlin, human resources director at Baltimore Washington Medical Center, has hired Moroccans who won visas in their home country's lottery. She also has had to place a Moroccan air traffic controller in an entry-level job after his training proved virtually useless in the United States, and she has turned away a Mexican couple who had paid a fortune for fake documentation. Loughlin and other professionals will share their hard-won knowledge tomorrow with representatives of small and medium-size businesses who are wrestling with the complexities of hiring foreign workers, including verifying their identities, understanding their documentation and avoiding discriminatory situations.

TODD POINT -- Phil Spedden is a regular on the "liars bench" next to a roaring wood stove where locals have gathered daily for nearly 60 years in John Lewis' Grocery. They gossip, swap stories, sip coffee and wrangle over politics as somebody throws another log on the fire. This year, the talk is often about the unusually lively race in Maryland's 1st Congressional District, where two state legislators are trying to oust Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest in the Republican primary. Spedden, a retired farmer, said various views can be heard about that among the wood-stove gang here in Dorchester County.

Eastern Shore seafood businesses expressed relief yesterday that a bill to extend a visa program that has brought foreign workers here has cleared a major hurdle in Congress. The Senate voted Tuesday night to extend the visa program, known as H2B, for one year. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, got the provision written into a spending bill. The Senate measure must be reconciled with a House version in a conference committee. The final legislation would be sent to President Bush.

A special visa program that has supplied Maryland's seafood industry with foreign workers is about to expire, and owners of crab-picking houses on the Eastern Shore say their livelihood is once again in jeopardy. The law that extended the H2B visa program, which has brought workers from Mexico and other countries to the Shore during the past decade, is set to expire tomorrow. While the thousands of workers already in Maryland will be able to stay until their seasonal jobs end in a month or two, they have no guarantee they'll be able to come back next year.

WASHINGTON -- Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates told lawmakers yesterday that the United States should welcome an "infinite" number of high-skilled foreign workers to fill engineering, computer programming and other jobs that otherwise would go vacant. Employers face a "critical shortage" of high-tech workers, Gates said. "There is only one way to solve that crisis today: Open our doors to highly talented scientists and engineers who want to live, work and pay taxes here." Gates told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that Congress should fix the "terrible shortfall" in H-1B visas, which allow well-educated foreigners to work in the United States for several years.

U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski has worked out an agreement in Congress that would allow foreign workers to return to jobs in Chesapeake Bay crab processing plants next season - a compromise that industry leaders say is crucial to maintaining their work force and their economic survival. In an 11th-hour move, Mikulski was able to include language in a Department of Defense authorization bill that lawmakers are expected to approve before they adjourn this weekend. "This is huge for us, just huge," said Jack Brooks, whose family owns J. M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge, the Eastern Shore's oldest crab-picking house.