WENATCHEE, Wash.—With immigration reform dead in the U.S. House, agricultural employers throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond will continue to turn to the H-2A guestworker visa program to meet their labor needs, a labor association leader says.
Rapid growth of H-2A workers in landscape nurseries, berries and tree fruit is likely in Oregon and in tree fruit and hops in Idaho as annual growth slows from 40 to 15 percent in Washington where use already is high, said Dan Fazio, director of the Washington Farm Labor Association in Olympia.
The federal H-2A program allows agricultural employers to hire foreign guest workers on temporary work visas to fill seasonal jobs. Employers must show a shortage of U.S. workers in the area and provide housing, transportation and a minimum wage.
Fazio talked with apple packers interested in the program in Wenatchee, Nov. 11. H-2A has been used mostly in harvest but it’s increasing in packing, he said.
The association, known as WAFLA, hires and provides about 80 percent of the 11,000 H-2A workers used in the state. That’s up from 9,000 last year and 814 in 2006.
Washington ranked fourth behind Georgia, Florida and North Carolina in H-2A workers in 2014. North Carolina topped the list at 14,502, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
“The domestic labor force continues to dwindle. 2015 felt a lot like 2006 where people were not picking lower value fruit,” Fazio said. “I look for that trend to continue. We’re competing with the construction industry which is still the highest paid seasonal work around.”
The Obama administration should make the legal H-2A program work better but instead has made it more difficult, Fazio said.
The president is more interested in pursuing his “executive order of questionable authority” to grant worker status to 5 million illegal aliens in the U.S. than he is in making the legal H-2A program work more smoothly, Fazio said.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the administration’s executive order Nov. 9. The administration says it will appeal to the Supreme Court. A week earlier, new House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said he will not work with Obama on immigration reform because the president can’t be trusted on the issue since he went around Congress in issuing his executive order.
WAFLA plans to open offices in Oregon and Idaho and sees growth for H-2A in hops in Idaho and Washington, Fazio said.
Oregon used about 250 H-2A workers this year and likely will increase by 100 next year, particularly among vegetable growers in the Canby area, said Montse Walker, WAFLA H-2A program manager.
Idaho had 30 workers on one contract this year and probably will have three or four contract for about 50 workers total next year, Walker said.
Source: www.capitalpress.com