Immigration issue leaves many crops withering
The death of meaningful U.S. immigration reform, done in by Washington partisanship and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s incendiary comments on foreigners, is leaving crops decaying in the field and the farm lobby with nowhere to turn as a labor shortage intensifies.
Carlos Castaneda watched one-quarter of his Napa cabbages rot in three of his California fields this spring as 37 immigrant laborers scheduled to arrive March 13 under a farmworker visa program were delayed by bureaucratic paperwork. He said he’d like to see fixes to an immigration system that causes his crops to rot unharvested. But he has little hope that will happen in this political climate.
“The rhetoric that’s getting preached is pushing xenophobia,” said Castaneda, 39, whose parents are Mexican immigrants. “You can’t call an immigrant a murderer. You can’t paint them with that brush.”
About a quarter of the U.S. farm workforce, more than 300,000 people, don’t have valid immigration papers, according to a 2009 survey by the Pew Hispanic Center. Other studies suggest the number may be more than 1 million. Proportions of undocumented workers tend to be higher in the hand-harvested fruit, vegetable and horticulture sectors, as well as large dairy farms.
The last major push for reform, a 2013 agreement that agriculture groups worked out with Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Michael Bennet of Colorado, both Democrats, along with Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida and Orrin Hatch of Utah, allowed up to 337,000 farmworker visas over three years. The current H-2A visa program for agriculture laborers last year granted 139,832 temporary stays, according to Labor Department data.
On the defensive
The rise of Trump, who felled Rubio and other reform-minded rivals to become the likely Republican nominee, has squelched any push toward reviving guest-worker proposals and put farmworker advocates on the defensive, said Craig Regelbrugge, co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform. Trump has vowed to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and has questioned migrant contributions to the economy.
“The atmosphere is so roiled with the presidential election,” Regelbrugge said. “The angst, the anger, the whatever that is so resonant in a fairly broad swath of the electorate, it makes House members, especially Republicans, fear they’ll be hurt in a primary if they work for reform.”
An immigration policy focused on closing the border would shift up to 61 percent of U.S. fruit production to other countries due to domestic labor shortages, sending jobs to Mexico and other nearby competitors, according to a 2014 study commissioned by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest U.S. farmer group.
Reforms that would include a guest-worker program and legal status for current migrants would keep those losses in revenue at 2 percent to 3 percent. That’s made the farm lobby a reliable ally in efforts to open immigration.
Talk of a guest-worker program is gone. Instead, farmer groups are trying to relax some of H-2A’s more onerous requirements while waiting for the anti-immigrant tide to ebb, said Kristi Boswell, a lobbyist with the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Labor shortage
Local crackdowns on migrant labor, including in Alabama and Georgia, have led to decreased crop production and worker shortages. But sympathy for the farm lobby is minimal among immigration opponents, said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington.
Even with a guest-worker program, farms would soon find themselves with labor shortages, simply because of what they’re willing to pay laborers, he said.
The average hourly wage of a U.S. agricultural field worker in April was $12, according to a survey conducted by the USDA. That’s up 5.6 percent from a year earlier.
In contrast, a worker in construction makes $17.57 on average, according to the Labor Department.