More on the AgFarm program

"Working the Fields," 1956, photograph of Bracero workers by Leonard Nadel, NMAH, History of Technology Collections. Smithsonian Collection.

Feb. 8, 2008, 11:43PM
Some farms oppose changes in ag-worker program

By SUSAN CARROLL
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Bruce Frasier's family has been growing fruits and vegetables near Carrizo Springs since 1913, when Woodrow Wilson was president and a gallon of gas cost 12 cents. The farm survived the two World Wars, the Great Depression and the oil crisis of the 1980s.

But, Frasier said, a persistent shortage of workers may finally drive the farm out of business.

This week, the Bush administration proposed major changes to the nation's agricultural farm worker program — called the H2A program — aimed at helping farmers such as Frasier, who complain that chronic labor shortages are hurting harvests. The changes would relax some bureaucratic requirements that critics say make the program too costly and cumbersome to import foreign workers.

It would also ease worker pay and housing requirements, prompting serious concern from farm worker advocates.

Frasier isn't swayed. He said no matter how the program is tweaked, he still won't use it.

"I will shut my doors before I go to H2A," he said. "I will scale down or do something else."

For many in the farming industry, opposition to the program is fierce.

In its current form, H2A is administered by three federal agencies. Companies must advertise jobs in newspapers or on the radio to show that no U.S. workers are available. They must pay workers' transportation, housing, meals and an inflated minimum wage. In Texas, H2A workers make at least $8.66 an hour.

Under the proposed changes, which will be under review for 45 days, farmers and growers would be able to pay workers different wages based on their specific jobs. The changes also would allow more industries to participate in the program.

This week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called the current H2A program "so unfriendly that, frankly, most people choose not to use it." According to the Labor Department, about 75,000 agricultural workers participated in the program in 2007, while the number of undocumented farm workers ranged between 600,000 and 800,000, though industry estimates of the illegal work force are often higher.

Protections at risk
In Texas, 279 employers applied for certification to hire H2A workers, and were approved to import a little more than 2,000 workers. During the past year, Texas growers — from nurseries in Tyler to onion farmers in Uvalde — have reported widespread worker shortages that have led to fields of spoiled crops. Stephen Pringle, legislative director for the Texas Farm Bureau, called the system "unworkable."

Labor advocates fear that the attempt to improve H2A may strip workers of protections.

Dolores Huerta, who co-founded United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s, called the proposed changes "terrible" for workers.

"There is no reason for them to dilute the provisions of the H2A program to import more foreign workers," Huerta said on a visit to Houston this week. "We're trying to get legalization for the undocumented workers we have here right now. "

Huerta favors a piece of legislation called "AgJobs," which would have offered farm workers a path toward legalization and revamped the H2A program. After the failure of the immigration legislation, the Bush administration announced plans to revamp a number of legal immigration programs administratively, including H2A.

Despite the general unpopularity of the H2A program, Fermin Venegas swears by it.

Venegas, a sheep shearing contractor in Fort Stockton, diligently applies to import H2A workers each year. For the past five years, he's imported 20 to 25 Mexican sheep shearers. They work for 10 months, then return to Mexico for two.

'I want a legal work force'
"It's a lot of paperwork," he said. "It's a process and it takes time. I'm not speaking for the general public, but it works for me. If it wasn't because of that, I would have been out of business a long time ago."

Venegas said shearing is a skill that few Americans have.

"I'm 100 percent for it," he said of H2A. "If I had President Bush in front of me, I would ask him not to take it away, but to expand it, streamline it, so we can bring people in to work."

Frasier, 52, the president of Dixondale Farms near Carrizo Springs, is asking for a slightly different solution than the H2A program.

Since his farm is 50 miles from the border, he would like to be able to get workers who can cross the Rio Grande legally for a day's work and then go home to Mexico at night.

"I need more workers, and I want a legal work force," he said.

He said he's lucky to have some workers who have picked fruits and vegetables near Carrizo Springs for decades, some dating back to the U.S. government's original guest worker program of the 1950s. But his workers are getting older, he said, with an average age of 55.

"What are we going to do in the next generation?" asked Frasier. "I don't know that there will be a next generation of Dixondale Farms."

susan.carroll@chron.com