US: Farmers hope immigration bill yields more foreign ag workers
“The bottom line is people need to decide whether they’d rather import their labor or import their food,” said Randall Patterson, a China Grove, N.C., farmer who grows strawberries, cucumbers and watermelons among his crops.
But crops are being left to rot in fields from Florida to California and Washington state because farmers can’t find enough workers willing to pick their crops. And many of their former workers no longer show up because they fear being stopped by police on their way to the fields and deported. Many already have.
Of an estimated 2 million agriculture workers, according to United Farm Workers of America, some 70 percent are thought by union and agriculture officials to be working here illegally.
Addressing the agriculture labor shortages has been one of the less controversial issues in the immigration debate taking place on Capitol Hill. Many Republicans and Democrats agree that the agriculture industry is suffering because of a broken immigration system.
But resolving the matter for America’s farmers has been complicated because of opposition from those on the far ends of the debate. Many of those on the right oppose providing any legal path for those here illegally, and many of those on the left argue that the agriculture component must be addressed only as part of a comprehensive package.
A bipartisan proposal in the Senate that would create a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people living in the United States illegally would allow quicker legalization for agriculture workers.
They would be granted a special “blue card” that provides them legal status. After five years (vs. at least 10 for most other people here illegally), agriculture workers could apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship. The bill also calls for guest worker visas to be issued by the US Agriculture Department, rather than the Department of Labor, to ensure a sufficient workforce.
The main arguments against legalizing immigrant agriculture workers is that those jobs ought to be held by Americans rather than people who broke the country’s immigration laws, and that Americans would do farm work if growers paid a fair wage.
One of the most outspoken opponents of the bipartisan Senate plan, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., raised those points at a recent Senate hearing, where he cited the April jobs report that showed millions remained unemployed and only 88,000 jobs being created.
“I’m also dubious about the idea that there are jobs Americans won’t do,” Sessions said. “I worked construction in the Alabama sun, hauling lumber and stuff. I know Americans do that every single day, tough work that’s done every day. Where I was raised . . . we were told to respect people who did hard work and not to say it’s a job an American won’t do. Any honorable labor is good.”
Yet, there are very few US-born farm workers toiling in the fields.
Charles Conner, president of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, a trade group, said the country can’t continue to produce food in the quantities it produces without its foreign-born workers.
“If that labor was not available to us,” Conner said,“. . . it would mean that we would get that food from somewhere else beyond the borders of the United States. And that’s just crazy to think that we would allow that to happen.”
Citing a 2008 study by Texas A&M University, he said some 80,000 acres of fresh fruit and vegetable production in California alone has been moved overseas because of labor shortages, a trend counter to the desires of Americans who want more and more information about the food they eat and who want it locally grown.
Many farmers say they’ve made multiple attempts to attract American workers to their farms.
Source: www.tri-cityherald.com