Immigrants in agriculture become focus after death

DES MOINES, Iowa — The arrest of a Mexican farmworker in the death of an Iowa college student renewed calls to change immigration laws, but it also focused attention on the immigrant workers whose labor is essential to the state’s agricultural industry.

Hours after authorities found the body of Mollie Tibbetts and charged the suspect with murder, politicians including President Donald Trump, the Iowa governor and two senators expressed outrage Cristhian Bahena Rivera had been able to live illegally in the U.S. for years. They urged a wider crackdown on illegal immigration.

The response from farming groups was more muted, reflecting the difficulty in hiring people for the physically demanding work at dairies, slaughterhouses and other agricultural operations.

The day after Rivera’s arrest, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley acknowledged some of the most intense opposition has come from his own state’s agriculture industry because of its need for workers.

“We’re the No. 1 egg-producing state, and I can’t talk to the egg producers without this being a problem,” said Grassley, a Republican. “With big dairy farms — and they’re getting bigger all the time in Iowa — but even in smaller dairy farms, you hear it. You hear it in the industrial hog production that we have, and then you also hear it from the processing of our agricultural products.”

Fellow Republican Sen. Joni Ernst noted, “A lot of our agricultural industry does rely on many laborers, and we just don’t have enough of that labor pool in the state of Iowa.”

According to the Labor Department’s most recent National Agriculture Workers Survey, about 47 percent of hired crop farm workers in the U.S. lack proper authorization to work here. The most recent data available was released in December 2016 based on surveys from 2013 to 2014. The survey showed 68 percent of hired farmer workers were born in Mexico.

A spokeswoman for the Iowa Farm Bureau declined to comment, but the American Farm Bureau Federation said it would support a mandatory electronic employee verification system only if the federal government also created an agriculture worker program, protected employers who may have inadvertently hired workers not in the country legally and allowed workers already hired to remain on the job.