WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Wednesday proposed streamlining an agricultural guest-worker program, but growers and farm- worker advocates alike already doubt the changes will do much good.
With Congress stalled on broader immigration reform, the administration wants to ease certain wage, housing and other requirements in the existing guest-worker program. The revisions are supposed to make it easier to bring in the foreign workers U.S. farmers say they need.
“The changes … will go a long way towards ensuring that America’s farmers will have a stable, legal workforce they can count on at harvest time,” Deputy Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner said Wednesday.
The so-called H-2A program allows farmers to import foreign workers if domestic workers aren’t available. It is criticized often but used relatively rarely. Last year, about 75,000 foreign farmworkers entered the U.S. through the H-2A program, a fraction of the 1.2 million farmworkers laboring in the U.S. last summer.
“It’s nothing compared to our labor need,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno, Calif.-based Nisei Farmers League. “It’s not even a thimbleful.”
Cunha said Wednesday he didn’t know any grower in his region who uses the current H-2A program. Only about 3,000 H-2A workers came to California last year, amounting to less than 1 percent of the state’s total farmworker population.
