The summertime harvest of Palisade peaches, Olathe sweet corn, and Rocky Ford melons will soon be enjoyed by Coloradans.
However, the producers of such produce have a significant challenge. There simply aren’t enough employees.
According to David Harold of the Tuxedo Corn Company in Olathe, “I cannot find domestic workers who want to work seasonally at any price.” On their more than 1,300-acre farm, he and his father raise a range of crops, including sweet corn.
Those cobs have sensitive kernels that need to be handled with care. Those cobs actually need to be hand-picked. And there’s always concern about labor shortages.
Harold remarked, “I don’t see how we will be able to continue operating how we have traditionally operated.” But the thing that worries me is not working. being unable to proceed.
With a commodity like sweet corn, the issue might be particularly severe, but farmers all around the state are having difficulty filling their fields with labor-intensive workers to do the planting, weeding, and harvesting. Many people think that only Congress, if it can overcome enduring obstacles, can resolve this issue.
The workaround for visas goes to overseas labor:
Harold, like a lot of farmers, depends on the H-2A visa program to hire temporary laborers in agriculture. Some have been employed by Tuxedo Corn since he was a young boy.
They make comparatively good money. And since we are gaining access to a labor pool that may cost us five times as much if we had to utilize domestic workers, for us it’s a pretty good deal,” Harold added.
The federal government establishes the minimum wage for H-2A workers in each state to stop farms from paying so little that they have to turn away domestic workers out of business. That rate in Colorado is somewhat less than $17 per hour.
Harold noted that the application is still challenging to use. The lengthy applications, the requirement for farmers to provide temporary accommodation, and the occasionally delayed visa processing add to the already stressful situation.
Farmers want Congress to address these issues as well as make some more significant changes, such letting certain visa holders stay year-round and modifying the rate at which minimum pay increases occur.
For employees, a life of perpetual uncertainty:
There are drawbacks to the H-2A scheme, even for the workers. For many, the most significant is that they can labor in the nation for decades without ever having the possibility of legally relocating there or making it their permanent home.
A temporary farm laborer from Chihuahua, Mexico is Juan Francisco Chavez Santana. He has been gone from his wife and three girls for eight months at a time while working in Paonia for the past five seasons.
“My goal is to help the family succeed,” he stated in Spanish. He continued by saying that he would be open to a citizenship path. With permanent residency, his family would be able to join him, unlike with an H-2A visa.
As a family, “it would be a way to be closer together,” he stated.
Additionally, the H-2A program has occasionally left visa holders open to exploitation. The most recent instance was in Georgia, where dozens of individuals were charged with human trafficking after it was claimed they had defrauded the government of thousands of H-2A visas by abusing, threatening, and abusing the workers.
While farm worker advocates aren’t putting much effort into changing the H-2A program, they do see supporting modifications as a means of exerting pressure on lawmakers to address a more urgent issue: safeguarding undocumented workers in the country.
Despite the fact that the H-2A program employs tens of thousands of people annually, it’s estimated that nearly half of American agricultural laborers lack proper documentation. Supporters want them to be given a shot at obtaining legal status and, most all, to be shielded from deportation. They contend that it is simply just recompense for assisting in securing the country’s food supply.
Speaking for United Farm Workers, the group that represents agricultural labor, Antonio De Loera-Brust asserted, “If you feed America, you deserve the right to stay in America.” “We think that the opportunity to obtain legal status is something that the undocumented farm workers who have supported the American agricultural industry for many years deserve.”
Marisela Juarez, an undocumented worker from Georgia who has been in the country for the past 15 years, is one of those unauthorized workers.
“We are aware that millions of people are being fed by us. At a news conference held in December at the U.S. Capitol, Juarez stated, “Even though we don’t know them, it’s a way we feel connected with them.” She and the UFW pushed Congress to adopt a compromise plan that would reform the H-2A program and give a pathway to legal status.
“Farm workers are the reason you are able to eat today. This is the reason, in my opinion, that farm workers should only be legalized,” she continued.
Congress’s passivity on immigration
Congress would need to act on immigration, a topic it has long struggled to address, in order to find a solution to the labor shortage – either by expanding the H-2A program to accept more workers or by offering guest workers the possibility of permanent residency.
Even while comprehensive immigration reform may be the hottest political potato right now, politicians haven’t showed much enthusiasm for even taking on this little portion of the problem.