3 U.S. agencies huddling on alien worker barriers

Crops in the fields at stake, farmers argue

— With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, federal officials have begun quietly rewriting regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers legally can enter the country.

The effort under way at the U.S. departments of Homeland Security, State and Labor is meant to help farm owners caught between a complex process for hiring temporary alien workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of illegal-alien planters, pickers and even middle managers crossing the border.

"It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a work force and that is a factor of what is going on today."

The push to speedily rewrite the regulations is also the Bush administration's attempt to step into the breach left when Congress failed to pass an im-migration overhaul in June that could have addressed the reality of American farms, where almost three-quarters of the workers are thought to be illegal aliens.

In all areas of the farm industry, the administration's behindthe-scenes initiative to revamp temporary farmworker visas is fraught with anxiety. Advocates for illegal aliens fear that the changes will come at the expense of worker protections because the administration has received and reportedly is acting on extensive input from farm lobbyists. And farmers in areas such as California's San Joaquin Valley, which is experiencing a 20 percent labor shortfall, worry that the administration's changes will not happen soon enough for the 2008 growing season.

"It's like a ticking time bomb that's going to go off," said Luawanna Hallstrom, chief operating officer of Harry Singh & Sons, a third-generation family farm in Oceanside, Calif., that grows tomatoes. "I'm looking at my fellow farmers and saying, 'Oh my God, what's going on?'"

Officials at the three federal agencies are scrutinizing the regulations to see if they can adjust the farmworker program, a bureaucratic system so unwieldy that less than 2 percent of American farms use it to bring in foreign workers. They are considering a series of changes, including lengthening the time workers can stay, expanding the types of work they can do, simplifying how their applications are processed and redefining terms such as "temporary."

Administration sources, who declined to discuss the details of the proposals, said they are moving aggressively.

The agencies also are working on possible changes to a separate alien-worker visa program that allows in seasonal workers for resorts, clam-shucking operations and horse stables, among other businesses.

The administration has pursued the project discreetly, perhaps wary of the friction that illegal immigration has generatedbetween President Bush and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has strongly opposed many of the initiatives that Bush has pursued.

The attempt to fix the temporary alien worker visa program is one of more than two dozen initiatives the administration announced in early August. Most dealt with increased enforcement, the most prominent being a measure that would force companies to fire workers with "no match" discrepancies in their Social Security data or face punitive action from the Department of Homeland Security. When Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the enforcement surge, he also acknowledged the bind that agriculture faced.

"Even putting aside no-match letters, just our increased work at the border was actually causing a drop in the number of workers coming across," Chertoff said.

David James, an assistant secretary of labor, said the president asked his department, which has jurisdiction over most temporary alien worker rules, to review the entire program.

The current program is managed by all three agencies. There is no cap on the number of temporary alien workers allowed into the U.S., but fewer than 60,000 temporary-worker applications usually are filed annually to fill more than 3 million farm jobs.

Farmers must apply for workers about a month in advance, but the agencies often fail to coordinate their response in time for the harvest, which farmers can't always predict. At Hallstrom's farm, where tidy rows of tomato plants run almost to the edge of the ocean, half of the 1,000 workers are in the temporary alien worker program.

Hallstrom remembers putting in an emergency request for temporary alien workers one year and getting them 60 days later. She said the laborers spent two weeks pulling rotten fruit off the vines and the farm lost $2.5 million. "Devastating," Hallstrom said.

Growers also complain about the expense of having to provide housing and pay for transportation costs, visas and other fees. Harry Yates, a North CarolinaChristmas tree grower, estimates that his labor costs for temporary alien workers are $14 per hour, compared with a competitor whose illegal laborers cost about $7.50 an hour. Like other farmers, Yates said using temporary alien workers is an invitation to lawsuits from worker advocates and frequent government investigations. "I understand why so many growers are afraid to use this program. It is too expensive, too complicated, too slow and too likely to land you in court," Yates said.

Worker advocates, however, fiercely dispute this, arguing that farmers complain that the program is cumbersome because they would rather use migrant labor to keep wages low.

"The employers want to be free of government oversight, legal services representation for the guest workers and other efforts to enforce the modest [temporary alien] worker protections," said Bruce Goldstein, executive director of Farmworker Justice.

Industry lobbyists have sent the administration a set of detailed suggestions for overhauling the temporary alien worker program through administrative changes, which could take weeks to put in place, and through changes in the regulations, a process that takes months.

Some of the suggestions under consideration include changing the procedures farmers must use to try to hire U.S. citizens first. Currently, farmers must advertise the jobs, then submit an application to the Labor Department and another to Homeland Security to bring in foreign workers. Growers would prefer to move to a system in which they pledge that they have done all they can to recruit U.S. workers, but would no longer have to submit an application to the Labor Department.

Other changes under consideration would soften the strict temporary alien worker housing standards, extend the definition of temporary beyond the current 10-month limit, and expand the definition of agricultural workers to include jobs such as meatpacking and poultry processing.

Information for this article was contributed by Walter F. Roche Jr. of the Los Angeles Times.

Front Section, Pages 1, 10 on 10/07/2007

Upcoming Events