Strict Immigration Policies are Destroying Maryland's Crabbing Industry
On the other, immigrants provide the necessary manpower for businesses that require a high volume of low-skill workers, like restaurants. The current administration's anti-immigration policies don't just target potential illegal immigrants for deportation but have made it harder for laborers to get visas for seasonal work. As of right now, foreign workers are awarded work visas via a lottery system rather than a first-come, first-served based. Trump himself has derided this practice as unsafe and open to infiltration by criminals and terrorists, drawing ire for his wishes to abolish the program. This could be a devastating blow to many severely understaffed industries across the country, as the lottery itself leaves many business wanting for workers.
For example, the Maryland crab industry has reportedly lost 40% of their workforce for this year's crab season and nearly half of the Eastern Shore's crab houses don't have enough workers. This is bad news for crab lovers, as about 50% of the United States' blue crab harvest comes from Maryland. U.S. unemployment has steadily fallen since 2008, and as it has, the demand for seasonal workers in fields that require intense manual labor has shot up.There were reportedly 81,000 applications for work visas this January with only 33,000 visas available, presenting a huge problem, not just for the federal government but for the businesses that need these foreign workers to operate. On top of this, Mexican workers who depend on these jobs–some of whom who have been coming to Maryland for 20 years–are suddenly unable to feed their families.
Even fervent supporters of Trump's stance on immigration would be forced to admit that from a utilitarian perspective, this is a disaster, not just for the crabbing industry, but for the state of Maryland. Crab prices are set to skyrocket due to the limited availability of Maryland's crabs, and companies are losing millions of dollars, all because they can't adequately staff their warehouses. In order to help alleviate the problem, Maryland Representative Andy Harris successfully campaigned for an additional 15,000 visa approvals, but it may be too little too late. By the time the workers arrive and are situated, the crabbing industry will have already taken a huge hit, as we're already more than two months into crab season. This visa approval also doesn't guarantee that the crab houses' prospects will improve next year. The current lottery system makes it incredibly difficult for Maryland crabbers to know how well they're going to be staffed in a given season.
According to Harris, efforts to raise the visa cap have been stalled by labor unions claiming that that foreign workers are being used as a means to drive down domestic wages. This however, feels more like an attempt to shift blame, as the AFL-CIO is pretty firmly pro-immigration. In fact, most major unions strive to organize immigrants, undocumented or not. There may be local groups or factions attacking immigration, but the idea that these fringe groups are powerful enough to stop the passing of meaningful legislation is far-fetched.
Regardless of what Andy Harris can get done in Washington, crab picking houses can't continue to operate at a loss if the Maryland crabbing industry is to survive. This much is clear. The stringent immigration restrictions don't help Mexican workers trying to find seasonal jobs. And for all the lip service politicians have given to helping American businesses, these same laws have crippled one of Maryland's biggest industries. As a result, we're left with one question: who is the current immigration policy designed to help?
Matt Clibanoff is a writer and editor based in New York City who covers music, politics, sports and pop culture. His editorial work can be found in Inked Magazine, Pop Dust, The Liberty Project, and All Things Go. His fiction has been published in Forth Magazine. -- Find Matt at his website and on Twitter: @mattclibanoff
How to Change Peoples' Minds (Hint: it’s not with the truth)
Confirmation bias is the idea that people are more likely to look for and readily believe information that confirms their worldview. In a talk conducted with Google, Sharot showed the power of confirmation bias by playing a game with the audience. She wrote down the numbers two, four, and six. She then asked two questions. The first, was to come up with a set of three numbers. She would then tell the person whether or not those numbers fit the rule. After this, the person was asked what the rule is. The majority of people guessed trios like eight, ten, and twelve, and when asked what the rule was, said something about even numbers. In reality, any series of escalating numbers would have fit Sharot's rule.
This exercise illustrated our tendency to formulate strong beliefs based on limited data, and the immediacy with which we look for confirming evidence. The purpose in this exercise was to demonstrate how easily we pick evidence that comports with our beliefs, and how rarely we challenge those beliefs once we have them. Nowadays, with information so readily available, it's easy to go online and find evidence to backup any belief under the sun. With this in mind, it's easy to see how America became so socially and politically polarized.
Tali Sharot discussing her theories
Sharot goes on to explain even further, and discusses a few experiments she conducted regarding the way we reckon with data. According to her, beliefs can directly interfere with our ability to understand information. This phenomenon isn't exclusive to people with cognitive impairments either. It would seem, according to Sharot, that most people aren't hardwired for doubt. This behavior also extends to the world of debate. By using MRI machines, Sharot was able to measure the brainwaves of people in conversation, and was able to show that when two people agree, confidence in an opinion rises. On the flipside, brainwaves more or less shut down when people disagree. While this isn't surprising to anyone who spends Thanksgiving with their family, it's always worth noting when idiomatic beliefs, through careful study and observation, bleed into the world of cognitive psychology.
Tali Sharot with her Time cover
The real question is, now that we have scientific proof that these phenomenons govern our behavior, how do we use this information to our advantage? According to Sharot, we react to positive information similarly to the way in which we react to tangible rewards. When it comes to bad news however, our brain tends to prefer ignorance and "frantically distorts" information that a person doesn't agree with. The way to successfully discuss our differences is by framing them in ways the brain will naturally understand. For example, people learn more from good news than they do from bad. People also tend to believe positive statistics more than negative ones. By approaching a conversation from the positive, a person is more likely to be successful in convincing others of their point of view.
It'd be easy for an uninformed or casual reader to walk away thinking that The Influential Mind is about the power of positivity, and that Sharot's experiments are anecdotes designed to support this idea. This is the problem with pop psychology writ large. It forces brilliant scientists to condense their research. While the book is good for readers looking for a working knowledge of Sharot's theories, it necessarily eschews certain details in favor of readability. It's a good primer, but after finishing the book, more curious readers will probably want to dig into Sharot's academic papers in order to gain a stronger understanding of her work.Why All Businesses Should Pay Their Interns
The law was rewritten earlier this year following a string of class action lawsuits that were leveled against Fox for not paying its interns. The new law considers the seven parameters outlined in the FLSA, described as a "primary beneficiary test," as flexible, with no single factor being determinative. Unlike in years past, no threshold related to these rules has to be met. The law is now far more subjective and overwhelmingly benefits companies who wish to hire interns without paying them.
Before this, it was illegal for an employer to force an unpaid intern to go on a coffee run for the office, as this is neither educational, nor beneficial to the intern. An intern's work also couldn't benefit the company monetarily. So, if for example, Martha in accounting got behind on her work, contrary to popular belief, she wasn't allowed to ask an unpaid intern to fill out some spreadsheets for her, as this constitutes work that directly benefits the company. The law is now written in vague terms such as "complements" and "displaces" and tends to obfuscate this point. With these changes to FLSA, the Department of Labor has taken clear stance and has sided with the employers, not the interns (workers).
In a January interview with Bloomberg, Paul DeCamp, an attorney who works with employers regarding interns and labor disputes, said this about the original law: "If the intern did any productive work for the company it would -- at least based on the strict reading of the test -- be required that activity be paid, which is not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous."
DeCamp didn't specify why the premise of paying someone for "productive work" is "ridiculous," but it's safe to assume his point of view is shared with the people writing him checks. Don't worry though, he also assured his interviewer that "if the intern is primarily doing grunt work, not learning skills, not learning about the industry, but is simply replacing work that would've been done by paid employees and therefore amounting to nothing other than free labor and with no discernible benefit to the intern, I think courts would still be willing to say that is employment." Here's the thing though, companies can always find a "discernible" benefit. In one lawsuit filed by interns at Hearst, judges ruled in favor of Hearst, despite the interns complaints about doing menial work while receiving no training. The reason for the ruling? The interns wanted careers in fashion and entertainment, and menial work constitutes "real-life experience" in their fields.
These are just the companies getting taken to court. The rampant abuse of the internship system is nothing short of systemic. In an article in Forbes, Susan Adams discusses an ad she found for the shoe company Salvatore Ferragamo. The ad was for an unpaid "retail internship" that included walking the floor and assisting customers inside of a Salvatore Ferragamo store in New York City. It's important to note that this article was from 2014, well before the labor department decided to make its rules a bit more lax. This is the kind of abuse that was possible.
The fact of the matter is, the latest adjustments to the FLSA, makes the already largely unenforceable laws surrounding unpaid internships, completely moot. There's no federal regulation in place to stop companies from abusing their interns and using them for free labor. The only recourse before was for an intern to sue his/her respective company, and now that that's off the table, those who would work unpaid internships have no real ability to fight for their rights as workers. This isn't just a labor rights issue, however.
When it comes to unpaid internships, the list of negatives is a mile long. These programs overwhelmingly benefit people who can afford to work for free. The rest of us are not so lucky, and the result is a class of applicants that is made entirely of young, upper-class college students or graduates that is neither representative of the American labor force nor fair to the many qualified people who can't get into the industry of their choosing. This is not a simple matter of millennials complaining about their job prospects. Unpaid internships create a huge barrier to entry that fosters and feeds wealth inequality around the country. Without these internships, it's harder to get entry level jobs, and by extension harder to advance in your career. Regardless of the "educational benefits," some aspect of interns' work will always help the company, and that work needs to be classified as labor. If a business isn't prepared to hire their intern at the end of the program, then why take the time to train the intern? The intern's work will always benefit their employer in some way.
Unfortunately, companies are always going to bend the rules and try to convince unassuming kids to work for less than they're worth, but if we have a system in place that helps protect that kind of skulduggery, rather than the workers themselves, are we not equally culpable for the societal damage it causes? Plenty of HR departments have determined that paying interns the minimum wage isn't worth the overhead, and it's important to understand they aren't particularly concerned with the difference between learning and labor. A company not paying someone for their work is a cost-saving measure. Nothing more. There should be no such thing as unpaid labor in this country. Pay your interns.