Minding Ag's Business

Members of the Agricultural Workforce Coalition remain optimistic that their version of a new farm guest worker program will be a centerpiece of the Senate's immigration reform bill when markup starts this week. That effort would replace the current (and much maligned) H-2A program with a new visa system that would help legalize current undocumented farm workers and make longer-term workers on dairies and food processors eligible for the first time.

More than 30 farm organizations are showing a united front to Congress--including heavy weights like the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, Farm Bureau and Western Growers, Frank Gasperini, executive vice president of the American Council of Agricultural Employers tells DTN. That rare unity is important because Congress is unlikely to pass comprehensive immigration reform once re-election campaigns start next year and presidential politics heat up the year after. Among the "agreements in principle" farm organizations believe will be included:

--A "blue card" program to help current undocumented ag workers become legal after at least five years and after they have paid all taxes and proven they have not been convicted of any felony or violent misdemeanor;

--A new agricultural worker program with two work options--a portable, at-will employment visa that would allow seasonal workers to move from job to job and a contractual-based visa, suitable for more permanent jobs;

--Pre-determined wage rates starting in 2016 at $9.64/hour for farm workers, $11.37/hour for livestock and dairy workers and $11.87/hour for agricultural equipment operators, with automatic inflation adjustment thereafter. Housing and transport to and from the workers' home country will be extra;

--An employer will be able to give preference to an H-2A worker over a domestic worker if the employee has worked there three out of the past four years.

The trade off for those priorities is that all employers will be required to use an E-Verify system to document their workers' legal status (see DTN's Chris Clayton's Ag Policyblog from 4/16).

"That mandate won't phase in for agriculture until the foreign visa worker program is fully in place," Gasperini says, giving the government time to work out kinks in the electronic database. At the moment, big dairies that use E-Verify have lost 10% or more of their workers when border patrol auditors followed up with on-site audits by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, he says. The new system will need to include biometric identifiers to be more effective at fighting employees who use fraudulent Social Security numbers. It will also need to improve response times, so ag employers can hire large numbers of workers at the farm gate and field to harvest fresh produce.

Handling E-Verify will be difficult until kinks are worked out, Gasperini admits, "but it's part of the deal. It's one reason we were welcomed as we were" in drafting immigration reform.

For details on the immigration compromise, go to http://ecbiz94.inmotionhosting.com/…

And Western Growers at http://www.wga.com/…

For background on E-Verify from American Farm Bureau go to

http://www.fb.org/…

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(SK)

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