Suman Raghunathan

Gosh Darn It! Those Feds are at it Again

Wow, I sound like a libertarian. Federalist Society, here I come!

In all seriousness, no, I’m not talking about some other seedy politician’s affairs (at least not this time). Nor am I referring to some other shenanigans of the Oval Office’s secret cabal of political operatives, a la Rove and his distinctly American spin on Rasputin.

No, I’m referring to the Oval Office and the Departments of Labor and Homeland Securities’ recent plan to push farm workers even deeper into the bottom of the barrel.

Yep. Undaunted by his dismal approval ratings, the tanking economy, or even the Democratic Presidential nomination ping-ponging between Senators Clinton and Obama, President Bush continues to try to Go Where No Man Has Gone Before on immigration (not on Star Trek.)

Blithely unaware of the resounding NO the nation said to his dismal guestworker proposal last year, Bush the Younger and the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor announced last week that they plan to broaden the existing federal guestworker program while weakening its protections for workers as well as its requirements of employers.

Let me fill in some of the blanks here.

Our nation’s farms employ about 1.2 million workers annually at peak harvest time. The Department of Labor estimates that about two-thirds of these workers, roughly 800,000, are undocumented. These are the folks who literally put the food on our table.

Current immigration law only allows for a drop in this large bucket of agricultural workers to enter the country legally – 75,000 in fact, through the existing temporary worker program. That’s right, a grand total of 75,000 farm workers legally enter the country annually via an H2A visa to work for growers for a finite period of time. Growers must go through a rigorous process where they repeatedly prove to the feds that there were no American workers available to work on their farms. They also have to provide housing to their workers and pay them wages set by a complicated federal formula.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not waxing poetic about the existing farmworker program, which most of us know ties immigrant workers to brutal working conditions, dismal pay, and gratuitous exposure to pesticides.

But instead of gutting a laughable program that meets (excruciatingly slowly) less than 2 percent of the nation’s need for farmworkers, we’re going to expand it?

Ohhh-kay.

The feds' current proposal would allow growers to simply swear (rather than prove with proper documentation) that they weren’t able to find American workers to pick their produce. It would also give more time to employers to show they’ve provided the required housing for farm workers they hire, and would lastly decrease wage rates for temporary farm workers.

The result? It’ll be easier for growers to lie about searching for American workers to pick oranges, for example. The proposal will greenlight agribusiness importing workers through a revolving door who are forced to work for even lower wages – with reduced worker protections. Wages and work conditions for farm workers already in the country – which aren’t exactly plush, we must admit – will then plunge further. (For more on why and how legalizing undocumented immigrants will help American middle class workers, click here).

Which brings me to the first (and probably the last) time I’ll agreed with FAIR (aka the
Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that basically wants to seal our borders):

“It looks as though the government is relaxing the rules to make it easier for agricultural employers to hire workers at whatever wages they want to dictate.”

Labor groups like the United Farm Workers are (rightly) up in arms over the proposal: check out their sign-on letter here and their diary on DailyKos here.

There’s a win-win alternative: one that will not only allow more immigrants to legally enter the country to harvest the nation’s produce, but will also let these workers stay in the country (with worker protections and fair wages) to continue doing so for future harvests. The alternative? AgJobs, a bill with bipartisan support that’s languished in Congress for over a year and a half after being passed in the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform package in 2006. Uniting strange bedfellows in search of a program that meets the nation’s needs for agricultural workers as well as those worker’s needs for legal status and workplace protection, AgJobs brings together grower associations, labor groups like United Farm Workers, and immigrant rights groups.

Growers get a reliable pool of authorized workers to pick their produce, who are not subject to a risky border crossings or how frisky Border Patrol agents are feeling on a given day. Farm workers get a way to legally work in the US, and ultimately (if they play by the rules) permanent residency for themselves and their families. American workers make sure their wages and work conditions aren’t eroded by those of undocumented workers at their employers’ mercy.

Sounds like a win-win-win situation to me.

Suman Raghunathan: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 8:37 AM, Feb 13, 2008 in Immigration
Permalink | Email to Friend