FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 9, 2012
Contact: Tom Pfeifer, (202) 225-5811
Statement of Chairman Elton Gallegly
Hearing on Regional Perspectives on Agricultural Guest Worker Programs
WASHINGTON, DC—Good morning. Today’s subcommittee hearing represents our third hearing on the issue of seasonal agricultural labor and legislative proposals regarding a guest worker program. This is a complex issue, which impacts not only farm workers and agricultural employers, but also U.S. workers, local communities throughout the United States and American taxpayers.
This is a critical issue to U.S. agriculture because real world experience has shown that there simply are not enough Americans willing work as migrant farm workers.
The labor-intensive branch of agriculture – fruits, vegetables and horticultural specialties – employs over 1.2 million individual farm workers a year. Each year, farm workers are interviewed by the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Worker Survey. The survey found that over the 2007-09 period, 48 percent of farm workers admitted to being illegal immigrants.
The actual figure may be even higher. And NAWS shows that 85 percent of first-time farm workers admit to being illegal immigrants.
What options for legal workers do growers have? Since 1986, the H-2A program has made visas available for temporary agricultural workers. However, 16 years ago, American agriculture told this subcommittee that the H-2A program was “characterized by extensive complex regulations that hamstring employers who try to use it and by costly litigation challenging its use when admissions of alien workers are sought.” They alleged that the Department of Labor was “implacably opposed to the program.”
Front and center in growers’ minds was ensuring the availability of sufficient labor to meet crucial needs like harvesting, whose timing varies with the weather. Unfortunately, timeliness has never been the H-2A program’s strong suit. Neither has realism about the availability of domestic labor. It seems that little has changed in the intervening 16 years.
The Bush Administration’s Labor Department initiated a bold plan to revamp the H-2A program. The plan remade the program into an attestation-based system designed to streamline the regulatory process and speed up the availability of guest workers to growers that faced a labor shortage. It was also designed to make the costs of the program more manageable for growers.
Although the regulations certainly did not resolve all of agriculture’s labor needs, especially for growers of specialty crops and for the dairy industry, they did receive generally positive reviews from the grower community.
Unfortunately, one of the first actions of the Labor Department under the Obama administration was to rescind these regulations. We are now back with a visa program that growers consider dysfunctional.
I look forward to listening to the testimony of a diverse panel of witnesses, who will discuss both the pros and cons of the H-2A program, as well as specific recommendations for an alternative guest worker program. It is my hope that this hearing will plant the seed for much-needed reform to our agricultural visa program.
Related content: Key Issue: Illegal Immigration.
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