CAMBRIDGE, Maryland — On Capitol Hill, Rep. Andy Harris is one of the most uncompromising advocates of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. On the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the Maryland Republican is seen as a hero for securing foreign labor to power his state’s commercial seafood industry.
The 69-year-old lawmaker, who chairs the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and the subcommittee that funds the Department of Agriculture, has leveraged his influence as one of Washington’s most prominent hard-liners to lobby the White House in favor of a robust influx of temporary foreign workers.
That meant convincing the Trump administration earlier this year to max out the number of guest workers allowed for the season, helping businesses throughout the country — including seafood producers in his district, who bring in workers from Mexico to hand-pick meat from the region’s blue crabs.
“I’ve been in long enough to know how to get things done, and we got it done,” Harris told Jack Brooks, owner of the J.M. Clayton crab company, on a recent afternoon outside his facility along the Choptank River.
It’s not just a parochial priority for Harris, who has grander ambitions to increase the number of seasonal workers who flow in and out of the country. He’s driving a debate within the Republican party about whether the president’s “America First” agenda means aggressively stemming the number of foreigners who enter the United States — both legally and illegally — or helping the U.S. economy with regulated foreign labor.
Harris told Brooks he plans to build on his success by working to guarantee longtime H-2B employers get the positions they seek regardless of their luck in a yearly lottery.
“We appreciate you out there battling on our behalf, for sure,” Brooks said to Harris. “I know you’re just one guy.”
The H-2B visa program Harris wants to expand is distinct from a separate temporary visa program for migrant farmworkers. It’s instead aimed at nonagricultural jobs such as landscaping, construction and, in this case, “crab picking.”
There is no conflict, Harris argues, between his endorsement of the president’s aggressive approach to illegal immigration and his support for more temporary foreign workers who return to their home countries each year.
At the same time, Harris — the son of immigrants from Central Europe — also consistently rails against amnesty policies that would create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“This is not an immigration issue — this is a temporary foreign worker issue,” Harris said in an interview. “Once we control the uncontrolled border crossing, let’s talk about how we can bring a foreign workforce in to boost the economy where it needs to be boosted.”
Under the “Buy American, Hire American” agenda Trump has pursued throughout his first and second terms, his administration has often resisted calls to issue the maximum number of H-2B visas Congress allows. This year, however, Harris traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue at a crucial moment to persuade the White House otherwise — quietly locking in roughly 65,000 positions for workers with H-2B visas for the current season, about 30,000 more than what the Trump administration had announced it would allow.
The White House’s decision to boost the number of visas followed the termination of work documents for 1.3 million undocumented immigrants, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. The Trump administration’s No. 1 priority, she said, “is protecting American jobs and wages” while meeting the demands of the president’s “rapidly growing economy.”
Harris pitched Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in recent weeks on his ideas for embracing an influx of temporary foreign workers as Trump promises “a Golden Age of American agriculture” and a renaissance for U.S. manufacturing amid record tariffs and new Republican-led tax perks.
“I think they realized that — as we bring work back — we are going to have to provide the labor here,” Harris said.
The congressman also wants to impose a “buy American” mandate for SNAP food assistance to ensure the roughly $100 billion in federal aid each year is used to purchase food grown and produced in the United States. “But that means that you’re going to have to have workers here,” Harris explained.
Asked about the Trump administration’s reception of Harris’ ideas, a spokesperson for USDA said in a statement that the president “is putting America First” by “streamlining” visa policy and “prioritizing fixing programs farmers and ranchers rely on to produce the safest and most productive food supply in the world.”
To close followers of visa policy debate in Washington, it’s clear that Harris is “the ringleader” of the push to expand the pool of temporary foreign workers, said Daniel Costa, a director at the Economic Policy Institute, a group that is critical of the way workers are treated under the H-2B program.
While Harris’ stance is not “a paradox,” Costa said in an interview, it’s certainly in conflict with the MAGA vision of top Trump advisers, including Stephen Miller. Harris’ lobbying effort is reminiscent of the “fracture in the Republican coalition” last year when Elon Musk pressed the president to boost a separate visa program for high-skilled workers against the guidance of other close Trump allies, he added.
Back in Harris’ district, seafood processors on the Eastern Shore have for decades struggled to fill key gaps in their workforce. “Crab pickers” began moving into manufacturing and other jobs in the mid-1990s, forcing business owners in the region to start seeking seasonal foreign workers.
At that time, there were more than 50 crab producers in the area. Those businesses that didn’t bring in foreign employees quickly closed, followed in later years by those that had bad luck in the visa lottery. Local crab producers still standing estimate there are fewer than a dozen remaining.
Lindy’s Seafood, another producer on the Eastern Shore, was not awarded any foreign workers in this year’s initial federal lottery. But the company lucked out when the Trump administration opened up the supplemental visas Harris helped secure.
“It’s a scary thing to go through, when every year is kind of tossing the dice,” said Aubrey Vincent, the company’s owner.
Other Maryland lawmakers have tried to help. Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks have joined with lawmakers from states with big seafood industries to push a bipartisan bill that would exempt seafood processors from the cap on H-2B visas.
“It’d be nice to have the Trump administration support this effort,” Van Hollen said in an interview. “But regardless, we’re going to push very hard to get it done.”
Maryland’s Democrats don’t have the same sway right now as Harris, the sole Republican in his state’s 10-member congressional delegation and the only Marylander on Capitol Hill who has the ear of Trump administration officials mostly disinterested in working across the aisle.
Before Harris was elected to Congress in 2011, Maryland’s crab producers had another powerful advocate: then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who later chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee. After the limit on H-2B visas was first imposed in 2005, Mikulski succeeded in excluding returning workers from the visa cap.
But when Mikulski retired in 2017, Senate support for that policy died. “As soon as you lost the bicameral advocacy for it, it just became difficult,” said Harris, who pushed the policy in the House while Mikulski championed it in the Senate.
In 2016, appropriators started adding language to the annual funding bills allowing DHS to issue about 65,000 extra H-2B visas per year — the quota Harris got the Trump administration to fulfill this year.
Now Harris is working alongside the Senate funding panel’s current chair, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, to advocate for the visas, which she argues are essential to “temporarily fill the seasonal roles that many inns, restaurants, and hotels rely on” during the summer tourism boom in her home state, whose license plates read “Vacationland.”
For the upcoming fiscal year, Harris wants to add what he calls “certified employer” language to a full-year funding bill for DHS. That means businesses that have used the H-2B visa program to hire temporary foreign workers for several years could go through a process to guarantee they get the same number of seasonal employees each year.
Some of Harris’ colleagues suggest waiting for a comprehensive immigration overhaul package to make changes to the H-2B visa program, rather than tackle it piecemeal. But Congress hasn’t been able to achieve such a feat in 40 years, and Harris isn’t interested in waiting.
“It’s not going to be anytime soon,” Harris said. “So let’s just deal with the issue now.”