Anticipated executive action giving temporary safe haven and work authorization to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants won’t ease and may exacerbate the national shortage of seasonal farmworkers, several industry labor experts say.
President Barack Obama has said he will act unilaterally on the issue before Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress are sworn into office in January.
“It most likely would be bad for agriculture as industries situated just above agriculture on the jobs ladder — higher pay, better conditions, reduced seasonality — will actively recruit … ultimately taking more farmworkers away from an already short supply,” said Lee Wicker, deputy director of the North Carolina Growers Association in Vass, N.C.
The farm labor market is “bad and deteriorating rapidly” because fewer illegals are crossing the border and those already here are finding more appealing jobs, Wicker said.
“You may make $12 per hour picking strawberries but it may be fewer hours and less stable than $9 per hour in some other work,” he said.
It would be better if the president waited and “worked with the new Congress so that potential remedies would be more durable, bipartisan, legitimate and accepted by Americans,” Wicker said.
North Carolina leads in the nation in use of H-2A visa foreign guestworkers at 14,500 and has been steadily increasing for labor-intensive crops such as tobacco, fruits and vegetables.
A better guestworker program would do more to give farmers stability and stem the slide of fruit and vegetable production to other countries, threatening U.S. food security, he said. But, he said, he doesn’t expect any action from the president on that.
Leon Sequeira, a Washington, D.C., labor attorney and a former assistant secretary of labor in the Bush administration, said agricultural labor shortages likely would worsen with legalization because workers would use it to find other jobs.
Unilateral presidential action is “misguided” and another example of the president’s “failed approach at governing,” Sequeira said. If the president is “actually interested in meaningful reform,” he should engage Congress, but his unilateral action “appears designed to appeal to a narrow slice of the base of the Democratic Party,” he said.
Obama promised that base he would act and feels obligated to do so, said Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League in Yakima, Wash.
While saying executive action won’t solve ag labor shortages, Gempler called it “a positive step to move the ball forward” and said it’s unlikely Republicans will address undocumented workers but may pass border enforcement and guestworker reforms.
There’s potential for farmworkers newly legalized to move into other industries, but it would be good to get away from false documents, he said.
About a dozen orchard managers and foremen get deported annually in Washington state, causing disruptions, and it could prevent that, he said.
Jeff Stone, executive director of the Oregon Association of Nurseries in Wilsonville, Ore., said the anticipated executive order would be “a step in the right direction,” but falls short.
“What solves the problem for agriculture is a better guestworker program. You need comprehensive reform that serves the needs of the economy for the next 10 years. No one is owning that,” he said.
Stone blames House Republicans for recent inaction, and Democrats for not acting when they had majorities in 2009-2010. He said the new Congress will be no more likely to pass comprehensive reform than the old one.
Oregon’s landscape nurseries have been suffering worsening labor shortages for years, he said.
Source: www.capitalpress.com