State leaders are sounding the alarm, claiming a crawfish shortage could send a negative ripple effect across Louisiana.
During a committee hearing this week, Louisiana Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Mike Strain alerted state leaders that the federal government reached their quota for temporary work visas.
The visas allow business owners to hire migrants for seasonal non-agricultural jobs, which is exactly how crawfish farmers get their workers to harvest for the season.
“Plants that get 100–135 workers get 0,” Strain said, “I’m frustrated by the issues from Washington.”
With no workers to harvest, restaurant owner Steve Beene, who owns Bayou Boil N Geaux, tells WDSU he is seeing far less crawfish than he has in years past.
“I’m getting about 40 to 50 percent less,” Beene said.
He tells WDSU because of this, it’s impacting his bottom line.
“We don’t have the volume, and we have the same costs,” Beene said, “Labor and everything else, we can’t just get rid of people and say you can’t work this week because we don’t have crawfish.”
Thursday, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser acknowledged the pains businesses across the state could feel.
“It’s a big part of our tourism industry, people come here to eat crawfish for fair and festival season,” Nungesser said. “The local restaurants make money off of it, so it’s going to have a ripple effect across our industry.”
Nungesser said he sent letters to Washington to try to get them to release more visas.
“They said there were 44k request they only approved 12k in that batch. It doesn’t make any sense,” Nungesser said.
The lieutenant governor tells WDSU he doesn’t have high hopes that Washington will respond, but he does believe this will be a big topic at the start of next week’s regular session.
He said he believes it’s going to take all state lawmakers to reach out to Congress to hopefully get some of the visas released.
READ MORE:State leaders call on Washington as restaurants feel impacts of crawfish shortage
