There’s a “staff editorial” today at the Baton Rouge Advocate – they call it a “staff editorial” when the take it includes is so stupid that none of the paper’s editorial writers have the guts to own it with their own byline – complaining that the Trump administration’s “immigration policy” is causing a crisis for the crawfish industry.

No, we aren’t going to link to it. It’s behind a paywall, and we aren’t going to give them free links for paid op-eds which are wrong on both immigration and economics.

Instead, we’re going to address the underlying stupidity of the general argument being made here.

First, there are crawfish packing plants who are complaining that they’re facing a labor shortage because the Trump administration hasn’t processed enough guest worker visas that they can import Mexicans to peel all the crawfish.

This does NOT affect the amount of live or boiled crawfish available to the public. What we’re talking about here is the peeled and processed kind which ends up in grocery stores around the country.

Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain is taking up for the processing plants, which is his job, and he’s howling about the situation…

The commissioner of agriculture and forestry is sounding the alarm over the lack of crawfish peelers in the state. Mike Strain says this is because the Department of Homeland Security has stopped processing H-2B applications for skilled guest workers, preventing them from coming back.

“A lot of these workers have been coming back up to 15 years. They come here, they stay about six months and they go home. Returning skilled guest workers,” Strain said.

Strain says these guest workers are doing the work for upwards of $18 an hour; and it’s work that Americans will not do, to the chagrin of crawfish farmers.

“In addition to that wage, those companies have to provide housing, transportation; there’s a lot of fees involved. So it’s very expensive to bring these workers in,” Strain explained.

Strain says of the 20 major crawfish processors, 15 of them have not received any guest workers, and the federal government’s inaction is on the verge of doing irreparable financial harm.

“The hit to our farmers is about $121 million. A hit to the economy is about $300 million, simply because they won’t allow the returning guest workers, who come every year, who are properly applied for, to come in,” Strain said.

The crawfish processors long ago gave up on two things – automating the peeling process, which there is more than enough available technology to do, or paying local people a market wage to be peelers. Strain says people won’t peel crawfish for $18 an hour – well, then, the market wage is higher, and in a market economy they’ll just have to pay it, won’t they?

And don’t tell us they can’t go higher. Strain gave up that ghost when he said on top of the $18 an hour the plants have to give room and board to the guest workers. You don’t have to do that if you hire the locals.

We’re laughing because Sen. Regina Barrow has a stupid bill in this year’s legislative session which would move the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.25 an hour and put it in the constitution, and they’ll pay you double her stupid minimum wage to sit in a chair and peel crawfish, which you can do while listening to Lil’ Wayne on your Beats By Dr. Dre headphones.

It’s absurd. The whole thing is absurd.

And if they really can’t find crawfish peelers at any price, then maybe that’s an indictment of our welfare state which is putting such a strain on state and national budgets, don’t you think?

The threat being put forth in order to defend these business practices is that Chinese and Vietnamese crawfish will flood the market otherwise. Which isn’t an altogether unreasonable argument, but on the other hand you’ve got a presidential administration right now which is more than willing to protect American  producers in venues like this.

And the entire point of protecting American producers is to do it for a little while so that they get some breathing room to build up their business in a way that they can lead the market.

In English, that means investing in technology so you don’t need vast armies of crawfish peelers and your plant is largely automated.

This is exactly what Vice President Vance has been talking about for a year and a half. It sounds like the crawfish processing people weren’t listening.

This year looks like a very, very abundant crop of crawfish. The winter in south Louisiana was pretty mild, all things considered, and everybody’s talking about how the crawfish they’re getting are huge already.

If the processing plants can’t get guest workers, then maybe they ought to start paying premium wages to folks for peeling. They can sell a whole lot of product this year, you know. And then start thinking about how to leverage technology to get a lot more efficient and profitable going forward.

Or, if not, then that creates a different scenario – which is that the processing plants can’t process so much crawfish this year and that drops the price of live crawfish through the floor.

Which is hardly a bad thing for people who like to, for example, eat boiled crawfish on Fridays during Lent.

The Advocate, and the people who want all the Mexican guest workers flooding those processing plants again this year, would have you believe that this is a disaster for crawfish lovers. It might not be great for people who want to put store-bought processed crawfish into their etouffee, but it’s a bonanza for the peel-’em-and-eat-’em crowd.

And then of course there’s the dishonest attack on Trump’s “immigration” policy – which is another way to say that you should be grateful for the illegals the plants hire to peel the crawfish when they can’t get enough guest workers.

Yes, you ought to be insulted by the idea that they want you to be grateful for lawbreaking.

We keep saying that Louisianans are no longer The Advocate’s audience. The leftist nonprofit foundations who throw grant money at that paper are its real audience. This is proof.

If there was a small crawfish crop this year we’d have “staff editorials” at The Advocate blaming it on “climate change.” Instead, it’s “immigration policy” which is the bugaboo for whatever the latest disruption in the crawfish market might be.

And they wonder why their circulation has dropped off to nothing, and why people are using Visqueen instead of newspaper to line the tables at the crawfish boil now.