U.S. guest worker proposal: Locally, plan sprouts hope

Bush administration’s plan to streamline the program has Central Coast farmers seeing more opportunities

The Bush administration on Wednesday proposed a streamlined agricultural guest-worker program that some Central Coast farming leaders hope will bring new opportunities for growers and employees.

A representative of San Joaquin Valley growers, however, did not see the changes as meaningful. These farmers seek a more ambitious guest-worker program.

With Congress stalled on broader immigration reform, the administration wants to ease certain requirements for wages and housing in the existing guest-worker program. The revisions are supposed to make it easier to bring in the foreign workers that U.S. farmers say they need.

The proposals make “the program a little more user-friendly,” said Richard Quandt, president of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties.

Labor contractor Carlos Castañeda, president of Mission Labor in Santa Maria and a partner in Castañeda & Sons Inc. in Grover Beach, said any change to the system would be welcome.

“Just about anything would be an improvement over what we have now,” Castañeda said. “What you have now is something like 70 percent of the (agricultural) work force living like ghosts as undocumented immigrants. We’ve turned a blind eye to it for a long time.”

Deputy U.S. Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner said the changes “will go a long way toward ensuring that America’s farmers will have a stable, legal work force they can count on at harvest time.”

The so-called H-2A program allows farmers to import foreign workers if domestic employees aren’t available. It is criticized often but used rarely.

Last year, about 75,000 foreign farmworkers entered the United States through the H-2A program.

That was only a fraction of the 1.2 million farmworkers laboring in the United States last summer.

About 3,000 H-2A workers came to California last year, amounting to less than 1 percent of the state’s total farmworker population.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others prefer legislation to enact a more ambitious agricultural guest-worker program that includes legalizing 1.5 million illegal immigrants.

Growers and farmworker advocates negotiated the package over several years, but it died amid the wreckage of a broader Senate immigration bill last year.

Quandt said one of the biggest challenges that San Luis Obispo County farmers face in the program is providing affordable housing for workers.

Employers could offer housing vouchers for the foreign workers, rather than providing housing itself, under the proposed rule.

Quandt said the association has considered looking into partnerships with Camp San Luis Obispo and Camp Roberts to see whether workers could live in unused barracks.

Maj. Mark Johnson at Camp San Luis Obispo said he would be willing to consider such an idea, but said it is unlikely to work because barracks are reserved for military personnel.

Lt. Col. Kevin Brown, the Camp Roberts base operations manager, said that he is not opposed to housing guest workers, but depending on what’s going on at the time, the base may not have room.

In a change that could affect farmworker wages, the administration proposes using Labor Department instead of Agriculture Department data to calculate the “adverse effect wage rate,” which is a kind of minimum wage. This “may raise the legally required wage rates in some areas while lowering them in others,” the Labor Department predicted Wednesday.

The United Farm Workers union fears the main effect would be lower guest-worker wages.

Quandt said a system that allows guest workers to come legally will help to avoid confusion when farmworkers’ Social Security numbers do not match federal government records.

The proposed revisions of the rules will be open for public comment for 45 days before becoming final.