Sea to Table: The Role of Foreign-Born Workers in the Seafood Processing Industry

Immigrants play a critical behind-the-scenes role in an industry that is increasingly important to American consumers: the seafood industry, which employs more than 200,000 American workers and contributes $38.5 billion to the country’s gross domestic product each year. In this brief, we explore this issue, using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate the contributions of immigrants in the fishing and seafood processing industries. Our work shows that, despite not making up a large share of the commercial fishing industry, foreign-born workers do make up a disproportionate share of a key specialty on which the commercial fishing industry vitally depends, which is seafood processing. Because of the perishable nature of seafood, it would be hard for the commercial fishing industry to thrive without a workforce capable of processing the seafood the industry catches.

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