November 26, 2024 — Legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) would allow seafood companies to hire workers through the uncapped H-2A visa program, greatly increasing the number of seasonal workers they could hire from other countries.
Many seafood processors rely on temporary foreign workers to fill seasonal positions, but by law, they can only apply for workers under the capped H-2B visa program, where they must compete in a lottery system with other industries like tourism, meat processing, landscaping, and construction to get their share of the 66,000 annual visas.