Ag chief: Migrant bill vital to farms

Lack of foreign labor could spur food shortages, he warns

The country’s supply of abundant and cheap food could be threatened by farm-labor shortages unless Congress passes comprehensive immigration reform, the nation’s top agriculture official said Monday.

The broken immigration system is already contributing to labor scarcities that are forcing some farmers to plant fewer crops and grow more food outside the country, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said.

“History has shown that when you have comprehensive immigration reform, when you have

an immigration system that is working, the economy grows, jobs are created and working conditions improve,” Vilsack said in a telephone conference call with reporters.

He released a White House report aimed at drumming up support for an immigration-reform bill passed by the Senate in June and putting pressure on Republicans in the House opposed to the bill.

The Senate bill includes a provision intended to satisfy both farmers and farmworkers. The provision would give undocumented farmworkers the opportunity to gain legal status right away and then apply for permanent residency in five years as long as they continued to work in agriculture for a specified time. The provision would also create a new temporary-worker program designed to give farmers access to legal foreign-born workers instead of relying on immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally.

So far, however, GOP leaders in the House have rejected the Senate bill, preferring to tackle immigration reform piece by piece. A farmworker bill pending in the House would also create a temporary-work program aimed at satisfying farmers, but that bill is unlikely to pass muster with Democrats or the White House because it doesn’t include a legalization program for undocumented farmworkers.

Vilsack warned that “significant shortages of farmworkers” means farmers are not getting their crops harvested.

“That, in turn, is making them make decisions about where they grow and what they grow and how much of it they grow,” Vilsack said, “which is reducing, to the extent that we are moving (production) out of the country, what is a very food-secure nation. If this continues over time, we are going to put that food security at greater risk.”

An agriculture-labor expert, however, said labor shortages haven’t been severe enough to cause farmers to drastically increase wages or cut back on crop production, which would lead to spikes in food prices.

Unless that happens, the farm-labor shortage is unlikely to generate the pressure needed for Congress to act, according to Philip Martin, a professor at the University of California-Davis.

“If there were to be big and visible shortages that got a lot of publicity, then you might get pressure to do something on (immigration reform for farmworkers), but absent that, it’s hard for me to see how Ag is going to pass on its own,” Martin said.

In the meantime, the status quo remains the “second-best solution,” Martin said.

“The system for all its flaws, it works in the sense that the employers and the workers they employ get most of what they want,” he said. “(Migrants) get the wages, and the work gets done.”

The White House report said that net farm income driven in part by rising farm exports is expected to hit $128.2 billion this year, the highest in four decades when adjusted for inflation. But those gains are threatened because farmers increasingly can’t find enough native workers, forcing them to rely on immigrants, many of them undocumented.

More than half of the 1.1 million full-time farmworkers currently working in the agriculture industry are immigrants without legal status, the report said.

Without immigration reform, increases in immigration enforcement could further exacerbate labor shortages, the report said.

The report also said that decreasing the number of undocumented workers would lead to decreases in food production, especially in laborintensive industries such as fruit, vegetable and nursery products.

On the other hand, legalizing undocumented farmworkers and creating an expanded guest-worker program would lead to increases in agriculture production that would create jobs and boost rural communities, the report said.

It cites a study by Regional Economic Models, Inc., a nonpartisan research firm, which estimates the Senate bill would create 51,330 jobs, including 993 in Arizona, add $6.6 billion to GDP and boost personal income by $3.3 billion over the first three years.