Labor shortages in Louisiana are causing a crawfish supply crisis for Southeast Texas, impacting Valentine’s and Mardi Gras celebrations.
NEDERLAND, Texas — Southeast Texans may have trouble finding crawfish at local grocery stores and restaurants this Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras weekend as labor shortages in Louisiana farms disrupt harvests, industry leaders say.
Restaurants report that farms in Louisiana are struggling to keep up with demand due to a lack of workers, with delays in visa processing for migrant laborers impacting the crawfish harvest. 12News spoke with a local crawfisher who said the shortage is making it difficult to offer a traditional crawfish boil this season.
“Every year, basically is different,” said Kenny Mings, owner of Touch of Cajun. “This year. We’ve got a shortage of labor.”
Mings owns Touch of Cajun, a one-stop shop for crawfish that handles harvesting in Louisiana, supplying restaurants, and serving customers at his Nederland restaurant. He said the drop in crawfish availability this year is not due to weather conditions.
This time of year, Mings says his cooler would normally be stacked with two pallets of crawfish. Today, there’s just one.
“This year, we weren’t getting enough crawfish to even supply restaurants, not only just our restaurant, but the other restaurants that we sell to,” Mings said.
Mings said the shortage stems from a lack of migrant labor. He noted that farms typically rely on seasonal workers to harvest crawfish.
“Typically, like our farm, for instance, we usually have 10 guys that work this year we’ve only got two in so far,” Mings said.
Beaumont immigration attorney Josue Cruz said delays in H-2 visas for temporary workers, combined with fear of detention, are keeping workers out of the fields.
“Now we have people that are really, really scared to even being in our state of Texas and Louisiana, because they fear to be detained and just taken into custody indefinitely,” Cruz said. “It doesn’t matter if you even have a work authorization or if you are going through the legal process of immigration in the United States.”
Cruz said businesses would prefer to hire locally, but few Americans are willing to take on the demanding work.
“Those are not easy jobs. We can’t deny that our tough jobs and people here don’t want to do it,” Cruz said. “So if we have people willing to come to the United States and do it, we just need to facilitate.”
Without enough workers to harvest crawfish, Mings said the industry could continue to struggle through peak season.
“For us. We make money when we move a volume amount of crawfish. We don’t make money off high prices,” he said.
Mings noted that he is just one crawfish farmer and that other farms relying on local labor are not experiencing the same issues. He said he is actively recruiting workers to try to meet demand during the height of crawfish season.