The hand that feeds
Late last month, federal prosecutors in Georgia unsealed a bone-chilling indictment about mistreatment of migrant agricultural workers. It read like something from another era: desperate migrants, kept in unsanitary, fenced-in work camps with almost no food or potable water, were forced to dig for onions with their bare hands, sometimes at gunpoint. They were sold and traded among conspirators, some being raped or killed in the process.
This was modern-day slavery, happening in plain view in the United States in 2021. No one could defend this odious practice, yet Congress’ failure to act even narrowly on the issue of providing legal ways for migrant farmworkers to perform the crucial labor of keeping food on our tables has facilitated just this type of abuse.
New York’s large agricultural sector is better regulated and more humane than most, and is getting better thanks to the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practice Act, championed by these pages over decades and signed into law in our newsroom in 2019. Yet even here there is a broken system that doesn’t work for employers or employees.
The H-2A temporary agricultural work visa is mired in red tape and has severe shortcomings, like an inability to accommodate the year-round work required on dairy farms. Undocumented workers, many of whom have spent decades working the land, have no path to permanent status, leaving them vulnerable to mistreatment ranging from underpayment to the horrors that took place in Georgia.
Amid constant recriminations about the border, a revamp of agricultural work and immigration is actually a point of broad consensus, dating back to when President Ronald Reagan instituted an amnesty for farmworkers in 1986. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would provide paths to permanent status for undocumented workers and reform the H-2A system, passed the House in March with 30 GOP votes. It has not left committee in the Senate.
As the perception that Congress can’t get anything done proliferates, here’s an opportunity to prove that there are still real problems members can work together to solve.