From Trump Country, an argument for welcoming immigrants

Some members of the lame-duck Congress are seeking a last-minute bipartisan deal on immigration reform before Republicans, including a contingent of immigration hardliners, take control of the House.

As usual, Republicans are concerned with making sure any deal includes enhanced border security, while Democrats are more focused on a pathway to citizenship for “dreamers” and other undocumented migrants.

But among those Americans advocating for legalizing some migrants’ status is a constituency often associated with Trump Country’s “build that wall” crowd: Midwestern farmers. In October, the Ohio Capital Journal reported that Ohio farmers consider a deal for migrant farm laborers “a matter of national security.”

Why? Because the United States, historically the largest agricultural exporter in the world, is beginning to buy more food products than it sells. According to the Agriculture Department, U.S. agricultural imports are expected to exceed exports next year and every year until 2031. A major reason is the labor force: “Americans just simply are not interested in working in the field, in the greenhouse, or the packing house,” Bob Jones, a vegetable grower in northern Ohio, told the Capital Journal. “We are either going to import workers or we’re going to import food. The choice is really that simple.”

Jones and others are urging Congress to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would create “certified agricultural worker” status for migrant farmworkers, allowing them to stay in the United States for 5½ years and apply for permanent resident status after certain requirements are met. The House has passed the bill, and The Post reported last week that Sens. Michael F. Bennet, D-Colo., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, were working to advance the bill in the Senate.

When I was growing up on a southern Ohio farm in the 1960s and early ‘70s, farmers had little trouble finding help. When it was time to bale hay, for instance, those with modest operations could easily collect kids from neighboring farms, pay us $2 or $3 an hour (equivalent to $17 or $18 today) and count on our help for a few days. Farmers planting thousands of acres of corn, soybeans, wheat and other crops — along with raising cattle, sheep or hogs — usually employed year-round help, which was easy to find from a pool of willing workers.

But, as Jones indicated, Americans increasingly aren’t — for a variety of reasons — as willing to work in jobs requiring strenuous manual labor, often outdoors in the heat or cold. Sons or daughters who at one time could be expected to take over the family farm are pursuing other career paths. These trends are leading many farmers to take the drastic measure of selling their land to wind and solar companies — and as good as that may be for sustainable energy, the world still needs to be fed.

Although a bill expanding legal agricultural migrant labor would help farmers in Ohio and other states, a broader bipartisan immigration fix being developed by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., would be more meaningful. The still-evolving bill is reported to include a path to citizenship for the dreamers in exchange for $25 billion in funding for border security.

For far too long, the immigration issue has been a political bludgeon for both sides — the right decrying dangerous “open borders,” the left lamenting honest immigrants forced to live in the shadows. Both sides are right and wrong.

The United States has a responsibility to vet people seeking to enter the country. Any deal should provide effective new tools to secure the border — including finishing walls already under construction and providing more border agents — but also recognize that even if people here illegally should, by all rights, be rounded up and shipped out, that’s unfeasible.

A more reasonable solution would be to agree to a pathway to legality for those already here — not those coming illegally in the future — including eventual permanent residency or citizenship, so millions of workers could thrive as taxpaying citizens moving from the shadows to the daylight. And that should be coupled with making legal immigration easier and faster, to make that path more attractive.

Finally, there’s this: Solving the immigration dilemma is the right thing to do. Despite a focus by the right on bad actors who enter the United States for nefarious reasons — and those concerns are sometimes valid — the overwhelming majority of migrants come here for a better life for themselves and their families. They risk their lives to escape hopeless futures and travel through perilous terrain. When people want to come here that badly — and are willing to work for us in jobs we desperately need to fill — can’t we find a way to let them?