Farmers say e-Verify could doom agriculture

Congress needs a guest-worker plan for the industry, ag leaders say.

The agricultural community is worried about proposed legislation that would require farms to use an employment verification program designed to weed out workers who are illegally in the country.

"It would completely decimate the produce industry in the United States," said Tom Nassif, president and CEO of Western Growers Association based in Irvine, Calif.

He addressed reporters in a telephone press conference Thursday along with other agricultural leaders, including Greg Wickham, CEO of Dairylea Cooperative based in Syracuse and also chairman of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives.

Dairy is in even worse shape than the fruit and vegetable growers when it comes to labor, Wickham said, because dairies are not eligible to use the H-2A guest-worker program, which allows farms to bring in foreign workers on a temporary basis.

"Dairy producers continue to have a workforce crisis," Wickham said in the phone conference.

Farmers advertise job openings and those ads mostly go unanswered, he said. When local Americans apply, they often quit after one to five days, Wickham said.

Many of the local dairy farms have turned to Mexicans and Guatemalans to milk cows and care for the animals. But those workers may not have legal documents to be in the country.

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday proposed legislation that the agriculture community has feared: e-Verify, to be phased in over two years. Wickham said if the legislation is approved, as expected in the coming weeks by Congress, "it could be the final nail in the coffin for the dairy industry," which is still recovering from drastically low milk prices in 2009.

Agriculture is vulnerable to e-Verify, which allows employers to immediately check a worker's employment status against federal immigration databases. The electronic system flags people who may be in the country illegally.

That makes up an estimated 50 to 70% of farm employees, said Craig Regelbrugge, co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform. Agriculture organizations have been pressing Congress for 15 years to overhaul immigration or improve guest-worker policies, expanding the number of workers and making the programs easier to use for farmers. But Congress hasn't adopted legislation to help the farms with their labor crisis, instead pushing more enforcement initiatives.

Before pushing e-Verify, Congress needs to address the hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers in agriculture, Nassif said. Those workers can't be easily replaced, given the lack of Americans willing to commit to farmwork, even in an era of 10% unemployment.

"Even in our current economic environment, these are jobs Americans won't do," said Chuck Conner, president and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, based in Washington, D.C.

The agricultural leaders want Congress to have a plan to allow the undocumented workers on farms to keep their jobs. The government also should start over with H-2A, a program with shifting regulations that are cumbersome, often leading to paperwork errors and delays, said Monte Lake, a labor attorney in Washington, D.C.

"It's been rendered unworkable," he said about H-2A due to "regulatory chaos."

Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming counties do about $500m of business annually, mostly with labor-intensive dairy, fruits and vegetables. Many of the fruit and vegetable farms that use H-2A have encountered denials and delays from the government, particularly in bringing in workers from Jamaica.

U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter represents a fruit-growing district that includes Orleans County. On Tuesday she wrote to Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, saying the DOL needs to streamline the H-2A application process for sake of farmers and the upstate economy.

The agriculture coalition is trying to find a champion on the Judiciary Committee in Congress, to help farmers with their labor needs. But Lake said no one has shown a willingness to address the problem.

That could doom the produce industry, which already is reeling in some states where e-Verify and stiffer enforcement are becoming law. Georgia pushed through more stringent enforcement and workers have stayed away. In some regions of the state, farms are short 30 to 50% of their workers, and millions of dollars of crops are rotting in the fields, said Mike Stuart, president of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.

"This is a serious issue," he said. "It strikes at our ability to harvest food for the American public."

(Published by The Daily News Online - June 17, 2011)