Many in state cool to farm fix

Enforcement's key in Bush plan.

By Jim Downing

The latest attempt to fix the nation's farm labor problem isn't pleasing anyone in California agriculture.

This week, the Bush administration proposed a revamped guest worker program meant to make it easier for farmers to legally hire foreign workers.

But the move failed to soothe California's agricultural employers, who say the little-used guest worker program will remain costly and cumbersome.

The change also drew protests from farmworker advocates for provisions that cut wages and weaken current guarantees on employer-provided housing and travel expenses.

Whether a significant number of the state's farmers use the new rules will depend largely on whether the White House follows through on a promise to prosecute the employers of undocumented workers, experts said.

"We are all going to wait and see," said Jack King, director of national affairs for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

Last year, California farmers hired about 3,000 guest workers, a 50 percent increase over 2006 but still just a sliver of a work force that reaches 450,000 at peak harvest.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that 53 percent of the national agricultural work force is undocumented. The percentage of undocumented workers on California farms is believed to be substantially higher.

Local farmers and labor contractors said they will have little incentive to hire guest workers so long as undocumented workers are available and unless workplace enforcement of immigration laws is tightened substantially. The guest worker program adds to the time and expense of recruiting workers, and requires growers to provide housing vouchers and a food allowance on top of workers' wages.

"I don't have a single client that would be willing to have me pass those costs on to him," said Brad Goehring, a grape grower and labor contractor in the Lodi area.

Farm groups also doubt the program could process requests for hundreds of thousands of guest workers on short notice.

"You're looking at trying to take a lot of people through a little tiny hole," said Barry Bedwell, president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, an industry group.

For now, said Goehring and others, the availability of farm labor for the coming season looks robust – a side effect, in part, of the region's ailing home-construction sector, which competes with agriculture for some low-wage workers.

Goehring manages a contract vineyard work force of about 300. Ordinarily, he says, some of his employees leave after each season and he has to find replacements.

"This year it's been absolutely zero," he said. "I think people are really valuing the fact that they have a job."

Goehring said undocumented workers also have been avoiding trips home because tighter border controls make it more difficult to return to the United States.

Border enforcement has also driven up costs for foreign nationals who want to become guest workers, said Erik Nicholson, program director with United Farm Workers.

In past years, private recruiters typically charged $150 to $500 to shepherd workers through the application process and into a U.S. farm job, but rates as high as $3,000 to $4,000 have been reported recently, he said.

Bruce Goldstein, executive director of Farmworker Justice, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, said he believes Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will carry out plans to prosecute employers of undocumented workers, despite the disruption it's likely to cause.

"I've heard Chertoff say he's serious, and I believe him," Goldstein said. "It will harm a lot of people and it will scare a lot of people."

As an alternative to the stepped-up enforcement proposed by the Bush administration, labor and farm interests continue to support a 5-year-old legislative proposal known as AgJOBS, which both consider a landmark compromise.

AgJOBS would temporarily legalize most undocumented farmworkers in the country, and provide the opportunity to earn permanent resident status if workers continue to be employed in agriculture for another three to five years. It also includes a guest worker program with somewhat stronger protections than those in the latest administration proposal.

AgJOBS has foundered several times in Congress since it was introduced in 2003. Most recently, it was included in the White House-backed immigration reform proposal that died in the Senate in June.

Two months after that collapse, the administration moved to appease anti-immigration interests and announced that the Department of Homeland Security would be cracking down on employers of workers who submit false Social Security numbers to qualify for a job – a common practice in agriculture and other industries.

But a labor-business alliance quickly sued, and in October federal judges in San Francisco temporarily blocked the plan. Homeland Security has indicated it will unveil a revised version as soon as March that it hopes will pass legal muster.

California's agricultural sector is by far the largest of any state, with about $32 billion in annual sales. It is especially dependent on seasonal manual labor because many of the state's millions of acres of orchard, vine and vegetable crops must be tended or harvested by hand.