Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Montross) visited Gloucester on Friday for a roundtable discussion with local seafood dealers and watermen, providing updates on state and federal efforts to bolster the “blue economy” and discussed the challenges facing the seafood industry.
Among the issues discussed were the new Seafood Caucus in Congress, workforce and H-2B issues, and the need for dredging.
Wittman said that Congress has to deal with immigration by allowing legal immigration and fixing visa laws governing foreign workers in the U.S.
“Why aren’t we doing simple things like that,” he asked. “We make perfect the enemy of the good.”
The H-2B visa program governs temporary non-agricultural foreign workers who are allowed into the U.S. annually to work. The cap on the number of H-2B workers has been 66,000 since 1997, but Wittman said Congress has found ways to get around that cap with such actions as not counting returning workers. But the bill needs to be fixed, he said. He’s hoping to do a carve-o...