With immigration reform in Congress dead for now, the question becomes whether undocumented laborers will return to the fields they recently abandoned.
Workers began to disappear from Colorado last year after the state legislature passed tougher anti-immigration laws. They became more scarce as the debate in the U.S. Senate heated up in recent weeks.
Colorado crops are not rotting in the fields yet, as they are in other states, officials say. But July could be a critical month, when tomatoes, sweet corn and lettuce start to ripen. In Michigan and New Jersey, strawberries are rotting in the fields and green peppers are choked with weeds, according to news reports.
The shortage points to the critical need for a legal guest-worker program and a secure ID system to verify those workers.
“We have a crisis situation coming about regarding agriculture,” said Troy Bredenkamp, executive vice president of the Colorado Farm Bureau. “We’re seeking a legal workforce as much as anyone else. But the bottom line is if we don’t get real about solving this problem, we will be faced with getting our food from foreign countries just as we are getting our fuel from other countries.”
If Congress needs to pass immigration reform piecemeal, fine.
Secure the border first. Then create a system that allows for guest workers and a fraud-proof identifier so the government can crack down on businesses that knowingly hire illegal workers.
Then maybe there will be some political will to talk about a path to citizenship for the more than 12 million already here illegally.
The system we have now isn’t working, and basically equates to silent amnesty: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Last fall, an organic farmer near Fort Collins was forced to let crops rot in his fields for lack of laborers, farm bureau President Alan Foutz said. The shortage worsened as the Senate debated the immigration bill.
“We now have sheep growers and cattle people who can’t find laborers to take care of their animals,” Foutz said. Even though prison labor is helping take up the slack, there isn’t enough to get the job done.
Foutz and other officials said Colorado growers are trying to do things legally through the national H-2A program, which brings seasonal guest workers from other countries. But the recent debate sparked so much interest in that program that the system is clogged. Workers who are showing up are arriving more than a month late. In a time-sensitive industry like agriculture, that’s not good enough.
In Michigan, asparagus is rotting in the fields for lack of workers. North Carolina advertised for 100,000 workers there and received two calls, one from a grandmother seeking summer jobs for her grandkids.
Last fall, a San Luis Valley spinach grower offered $400 a day to help harvest his crop and got no takers, shattering the argument that farmers aren’t paying enough to attract legal workers, Bredenkamp said.
This year’s immigration reform proposal was not perfect. The so-called “earned legalization” for millions of people had opponents in an uproar. They called it amnesty. But mass deportation is illogical and impossible. The bill contained fair and workable provisions, but the debate was neither fair nor honest.
Congress shouldn’t give up on finding a workable solution.
