New York Times Editorial on Agjobs

Editorial
Protecting Farmworkers
New York Times
Published: October 14, 2007


The continuing national purge of illegal immigrants has, as expected, caused a shortage in the supply of immigrant labor. Industries that depend on cheap foreign workers are feeling withdrawal pains. Crops have rotted and fields have gone to weeds.

The Bush administration is doing its part, raiding homes and annoying federal courts with crude and destructive workplace enforcement tactics. But now it is also quietly looking for ways to minimize the damage it has done, and keep its business friends happy, by overhauling a visa program to bring in more farmworkers. This is not necessarily a good thing.

The main legal route for agricultural guest workers — the H-2A visa program — has serious problems that need fixing. But the government, which has solicited recommendations from farm groups on how to streamline the program, must not let industry lobbyists dictate the changes. Doing so could erode an already thin layer of protections for workers who do some of the country’s most punishing, backbreaking jobs.

Farm lobbyists have sent the administration a wish list of regulatory and administrative changes that they say will lift unduly cumbersome barriers to participating in and expanding the H-2A program. That program now hires about 50,000 people a year, about 2 percent of the agricultural work force. But the barriers are there for good reasons. They require farmers to give guest workers free housing and decent wages, and to take certain steps — like running newspaper ads — to prove they have tried to hire Americans first. The industry wants to relax those hiring requirements, to charge workers for housing, to pay them less and to widen the range of jobs they do to include poultry processing and meatpacking.

Labor advocates who have spent years fighting for basic protections for farmworkers believe, with good reason, that the industry is looking to exploit the immigration crisis. There is a better way.

Congress should pass a bill known as AgJobs, a bipartisan measure with broad support in the farm industry and among farmworker organizations. It streamlines the H-2A program, but also includes a path to earned citizenship for farmworkers, an important step to curb exploitation in an industry overwhelmingly made up of easily fired, easily abused undocumented workers. Its carefully negotiated compromises are just the kind of approach to immigration reform the country needs — not the heavy-handed half-measures that make up the current shambles of federal policy.


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