Trump's immigration crackdown may impact some Maine businesses

Boston Globe

24-04-2025

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'Our producers are very careful about vetting their workforce to ensure that they all have the necessary and proper documentation if they are coming from outside of the U.S.,' said Eric Venturini, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission. 'But I am concerned about a decrease in the agricultural workforce due to shifting immigration policies that could make it more challenging for farmers to get their crops.'
Wild blueberry farms aren't the only businesses statewide that could be facing a labor shortage, compounded by escalating threats of deportation and revoked visas. Agricultural farmers of all types, as well as wreath factories, restaurants, hotels, fisheries, and other businesses have come to rely on the largely Latino migrant and year-round immigrant communities.
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According to the most recent 5-year estimate reported in the
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Among those who employ foreign-born workers is the group of Whitney Family Companies, which owns and operates Whitney Wreath, Whitney's Tri-Town Marina, Machias Glassworks, and Downeast Packaging Solutions, all located in Machias. Owner and CEO David Whitney employs an undisclosed number of seasonal migrant workers at his companies, workers he depends on to supplement his local workforce.
Whitney said he fully supports the Trump administration's tightened immigration policies. In 2011 Whitney's company became the first in the state to sign on to the federal
'We're under tremendous scrutiny, which is all the more reason that I continue to be motivated to follow the letter of the law. Always have,' Whitney said. 'I sleep very well at night.'
But as federal immigration officials ratchet up surveillance around the nation, advocates say many immigrants — even those who are documented —
Along the shores of Englishmen's Bay, sea spray wafts over the wild blueberry fields of Welch Farm in Roque Bluffs, owned and operated for more than a century by Lisa Hanscom's family.
Everyone pitches in on this small but productive farm, including Hanscom's 77-year-old father. But come harvest time, they still rely on a handful of migrant workers to help get the tender berries raked and crated before they rot in the field.
So far this season, Hanscom hasn't heard from the two Mi'kmaq migrant friends from Canada and the young Guatemalan man who she's counted on in past years.
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'The young man was legal, working on his citizenship and everything. But I don't know what that means for me this year, whether he's even going to be around,' Hanscom said.
Hanscom chairs the volunteer Wild Blueberry Commission in addition to running the farm and her full-time job as director of the Washington County Emergency Management Agency. She knows the blueberry business and is used to dealing with unexpected crises. But Hanscom said it's hard for farmers to come up with contingency plans to deal with such a rapidly evolving immigration landscape.
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In early April, the
The Internal Revenue Department also struck
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During an online presentation in February, Patrick Woodcock, the executive director of the Maine Chamber of Commerce, said that employers need to be aware of the potential ramifications on Maine's workforce.
'Regardless of the merits of the polic[ies], we really do want to ensure that employers understand how to be in compliance,' Woodcock said. 'There may be employees that were authorized to work that may be affected by changes and may not be authorized to work now or in the coming months.'
The Trump administration has signaled that it is considering eliminating, scaling back, or revoking some visas that employers have relied on to augment their work teams for decades.
The Monitor
reached out to more than a dozen business owners and managers to gauge concerns. Half of those responded, with only one business expressing concern about losing the visa program it uses to supplement its summer staff of about 30.
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Victor Trafford, who owns the Fishermen's Wharf Inn and Restaurant in Lubec, said the business typically employs 4-6 young women, mostly from Eastern Europe, each summer through the J-1 visa Exchange Student Worker Program.
'I think we're going to be okay. But laws can change — can change without notice,' Trafford said.
The Trump administration has also revoked the visas of hundreds of international students and detained roughly a dozen others from college campuses across the US, often without any warning or recourse for appeals, according to a recent report by the
A J-1 visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows students to study, work, or conduct research in the United States for three months or longer, depending on the visa. It's one of roughly 200 types of U.S.
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But the visas that most impact farmers seeking to boost their local workforce are H-2A agricultural visas, which allow foreign workers to come to the U.S. to perform seasonal agricultural labor. Employers in the service industry, meanwhile, often rely on H-2B visas, which allow workers to temporarily come to the U.S. to perform non-agricultural services or labor, such as hotel and restaurant work.
Last year in Maine, 41 agricultural companies each received anywhere between one and 140 H-2A visa approvals. Cherryfield Foods, Inc., a grower and producer of wild blueberries located in Cherryfield and Machias, received the most agricultural visas of any business in the state, a total of 140 H-2A visas.
A 2015 Maine Department of Labor 2015 survey, the most recent report available from the Department, found that 56 percent of migrant farm workers were from Mexico, with others from Haiti, Canada, Honduras, El Salvador, and the Philippines. A 2019 University Maine report found that Maine's migrant workers also come from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and from elsewhere in the United States.
Ricker Hill Orchards in Turner was granted 33 agricultural visas in 2024. The tenth-generation small farming business has survived 200 years of challenges, including a slumping local workforce that began during WWII.
Although it's bureaucratically burdensome and costly — north of $80,000 some seasons — company president Harry Ricker and his wife Nancy, who is the CFO, said H-2A visas have helped them hang on to the farm, allowing them to bring in dozens of hard-working apple pickers each harvest season, mostly from Jamaica.
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'There are a lot less local people that want to do it, so we have to have this program,' Ricker said. 'Without it, we'll just be out of the industry. We go away.'
Since businesses foot the bill for all visa fees, travel, and lodging, Ricker sees no reason for the administration to tamper with the H-2A visa program.
Some critics, however, including authors of the controversial
But H-2A visa advocates point to data that show persistent workforce shortages and the federal laws that tightly regulate migrant worker pay to make sure it doesn't undercut the local market.
Employers must recruit U.S. workers, including posting jobs on the US Department of Labor's
The authors of Project 2025 also have the H-2B non-agricultural temporary visa program in their sights, calling for the elimination of the visas that a host of industries depend on, from tourism and hospitality to restaurants and services at some national parks.
The H-2B program is capped at 66,000 each year for the entire country, with an additional number of visas typically added to the cap each year, including an extra 64,716 for 2025 announced earlier this month.
Although Trump recently signaled support for businesses that rely on H-2B temporary workers, the release of the supplemental visas was delayed this year. According to a recent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
There are never enough visas allotted to meet demand, requiring employers to compete in a lottery system, according to Kathryn Ference, director of Workforce Development for the Maine Tourism Association.
'The programs are incredibly important to the [tourism] industry in Maine and making sure that we have what we need to make this industry run, which brings so much economic value to the state, adding $16.3 billion to the Maine economy in 2023, [is very important.]' Ference said.
Downeast's largest tourism draw, Acadia National Park, doesn't use any visa-permitted workers at the park. The seasonal National Park Service jobs all have U.S. Citizenship as a condition of employment, according to Perrin Doniger, vice president of communications and marketing for the Friends of Acadia.
But in neighboring Bar Harbor, 99 lodging facilities and 66 restaurants rely heavily on H-2B visas, including five of the six Witham Family Hotels, said Managing Director Jeremy Dougherty .
According to Dougherty, the Witham chain employs roughly 500 people, with about 200 at the Bar Harbor Inn alone, including about 82 foreign nationals working on temporary H-2B visas. Dougherty said many are from Jamaica, as well as El Salvador, Haiti, and other countries. He said they are some of his best workers and that some have returned for 15 summers — if they are lucky enough to secure a visa lottery slot.
Dougherty said the visa process is arduous for both the company's human resource department and for the migrant workers, requiring months of applications, interviews, waiting, and then travel and housing arrangements before they even get to their first day on the job. This year, he said, some of the migrants are a little nervous, and not just about the possibility of being confronted by ICE agents.
'Some of our staff have asked how to best handle it if somebody were to say something that would maybe be inappropriate,' Dougherty said. 'In the last few years, people are a little more emboldened to say things to people of color than they used to, and it just puts us more on alert, a little more protective, you know, like protective parents.'