Will McCarthy help fix the broken immigration system?

Kevin McCarthy, the Bakersfield congressman and newly crowned House speaker, took a bit of a victory lap this month, as he brought his congressional cohorts to the opening day of the World Ag Expo in Tulare.

It was also a bit of a love fest, as farmers gathered around the localboy-made-good and his Republican colleagues.

“Instead of asking (farmers) to come to Washington,” McCarthy said. “I want to make sure Washington comes to them. Because they are the farmers; they make America continue to grow and feed the world.”

There was a lot of interest in how the new Congress will be hammering out a new farm bill — a dense package of legislation that is renewed roughly every five years.

There was a lot of talk about priorities — water access, fair trade, the rising cost of farming, etc.

But there wasn’t so much talk about the looming crisis that is threatening valley agriculture and has unified both farmers and farmworkers — the shortage of workers to harvest crops and the failure to pass the immigration reforms needed to assure their availability.

Efforts to pass immigration reform legislation have been derailed in Congress for decades. Most recently, efforts to pass the Workforce Modernization

Act and the Affordable and Secure Food Act of 2022, a last-ditch compromise bill that was introduced just days before the end of the last Congress, collapsed.

“Making sure our farmers have access to a legal and reliable workforce and streamlining the process for the future flow of workers is just common sense,” said Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, who has long fought for immigration reform, only to face opposition from those in his own party.

“It would have been a huge improvement to giving us a strong forecast of labor dependability that we don’t have today,” said Ian LeMay, president of the California Fruit Association. “We depend on an immigration workforce to pick, pack and ship our commodities in the United States. And it is and has been a broken system for too long, and it deserves attention.”

But immigration reform is a political hot potato that Republican politicians have been too afraid to catch.

It’s all well and good to show up to the World Ag Expo in Tulare and blather popular and benign platitudes. But when it comes to taking a meaningful stand on an important issue that has united farmers and farmworkers — two often warring interests — there was hardly a peep.

In a 2019 study, the California Farm Bureau Federation found 56 percent of the more than 1,000 California farmers surveyed reported worker shortages.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, more than half the state’s farmworkers are undocumented. The proposed reforms would have established a program for ag workers currently in the U.S. to earn legal status and have a higher minimum wage, through expansion of protections known as the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Protections Act.

“Farmers across the country depend on their families,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League. “But their family includes farmworkers. And after 30 years, these workers are still not getting work authorization.”

Frustrated by Congress’ failure to pass immigration reform, LeMay said farmers are now confused as to how to move forward.

“This is an issue that deserves leadership,” he said. “It will take leadership, but we’re looking for this leadership.”

We are assured that by McCarthy assuming the powerful leadership position of House speaker, his Kern County congressional district and its important industries, such as agriculture, will benefit from his new political clout. Long-festering problems now can be solved.

We will have to wait and see if McCarthy has the courage to catch the immigration hot potato. Can he be the leader that local farmers so badly need?