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The following editorial originally appeared in The Seattle Times:

The never-ending stream of divisive rhetoric around immigration and the southern border has long hindered comprehensive reform, as both Democrats and Republicans have made political hay out of a broken system.

The latest flashpoint is the end of Title 42, a Trump-era border-control measure that upended the legal rights of asylum-seekers under the guise of protecting public health during the pandemic. The matter is tied up in the courts but some U.S. senators seek to extend the order until 2025.

That would be unconscionable as well as counterproductive. Instead of swiftly deporting migrants and interfering with the legal process meant to protect those fleeing persecution, Congress should focus on solutions that not only tackle the factors that draw people to cross the border illegally but also address the labor needs of the United States.

One of those common-sense options is the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. It is the kind of clear-eyed, practical legislation that deserves attention.

Proposed by U.S. Reps. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., the legislation passed the House in 2021 with bipartisan support but has so far stalled in the Senate.

The act would give some immigrant workers without legal permission to be in the U.S. a path to legal status and streamline the visa-application process to make it easier for foreign workers to come here legally. It would also require employers to verify a workers identity and employment authorization.

Most farmers would agree that the No. 1 issue they face is the lack of labor. Crops dont harvest themselves, Newhouse, the states former agriculture director, said in a news release. This legislation would secure a legal, and reliable, workforce for all of agriculture.

Along with the impact on farm work and the nations food supply, labor shortages are a contributing factor to widespread inflation, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has called for an increase in legal immigration to help solve the problem.

Chamber-proposed solutions include permanent legal protections for immigrants that now have Temporary Protected Status, agricultural workers and young immigrants brought into the country illegally by their parents, known as Dreamers.

This is not just big business looking for cheap labor. Polls have consistently shown that most Americans support legal immigration, yet elected representatives just as consistently have failed to enact comprehensive reform.

The political realities ensure that will not change anytime soon, but the Houses bipartisan support of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act shows that modest steps are possible.

This legislation is only a small piece of the larger immigration puzzle, but its positive impact on the lives of immigrants and the U.S. economy should push the Senate to ensure that it falls into place.

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Other Papers Say: Legal immigration reform is key - The Columbian

Sherry Robinson| All She Wrote

Rebecca Dow, Republican candidate for governor, wrote recently, There is a lot of rhetoric thrown around when it comes to securing our border…

Rhetoric is a nice word for whats being thrown around, and Dow did her own throwing recently in a newspaper op ed when she said the president and the governor opened our border, ended the previous administrations remain-in-Mexico policy and stopped building the wall.

The open-border accusation is often heard on the far right, but its not heard anywhere else. Thats a problem for Dow who would need votes from Democrats and Independents to win in November.

And its false, according to PolitiFact, a service of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit school for journalists.

I would argue that the open-border myth is insulting to our border personnel who are doing their jobs 24/7. The vast majority of enforcement encounters result in people being turned away at the border.

President Biden continued Title 42, a Trump policy of refusing entry to most border crossers to curb the spread of COVID-19, according to PolitiFact, although its exempting children who arrive alone, as well as some families. On Dec. 2, the administration re-implemented the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as Remain in Mexico,which requires asylum seekers without proper documentation to wait in Mexico for their immigration court date.

Which is why immigrant advocates are complaining about thousands of asylum seekers stuck in dangerous Mexican border towns.

The administration has tried to back away from Title 42, but court actions so far are preserving it as a tool for immigration control. Which, in an election year, is fine with some Democrats.

Dow and three fellow candidates want the governor to send National Guard troops to the border, as Texas and Arizona have done. Candidate Greg Zanetti has not. The retired brigadier general of the New Mexico Army National Guard told the Albuquerque Journal the others dont understand the complexities of deploying the Guard on the border.

The National Guard cant be used for immigration enforcement. So in Texas and Arizona, theyve been helping for a few years. Assigned to keep watch in Texas, they lacked night-vision goggles so they stared into the darkness until they fell asleep, according to widespread media reports. They also built fence and clerked. In Arizona they cleaned stables sheltering the Border Patrols horses and maintained the patrols vehicles.

In March 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called 10,000 troops for Operation Lone Star and authorized them to arrest anyone breaking Texas laws. Both the Army Times and Stars and Stripes reported that troops lacked equipment, didnt get paid for months, and had little to do. The state packed 36 troops into windowless trailers. Alcohol and drug abuse became so widespread that senior officers resorted to breathalyzers. The army saw upwards of 1,200 legal actions for everything from sexual assault and manslaughter to property loss.

State taxpayers pay the tab because their governors ordered the troops. In Texas the budget for border security spiraled from about $800 million in 2020 and 2021 to more than $2.9 billion in 2022 and 2023.

The cost alone should give us pause, but remember that National Guard members have jobs and lives. If a governor calls them to do busy work, someones kids are without a parent and someones employer and co-workers must fill the void.

So where are all these people supposedly streaming across the border?

The Associated Press reported that immigration tapered off during the Trump administration and nearly stopped for 18 months during the pandemic, exacerbating the current labor shortage. This isnt news to farmers and employers.

Title 42 is a finger in the dike, but its no solution. That would require our congresspersons to sit down, hear each other, hear the public, compromise, and produce new law, as we elected them to do.

The rest is here:
To debate immigration reform, let's start with the truth - Carlsbad Current Argus

Around 100,000 undocumented immigrants will graduate high school in 2022 without a shot at work permits, the first time in a decade that a majority of so-called Dreamers will not be eligible.

Most undocumented 2022 graduates have not been in the country long enough to be covered by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era policy that was the focus of attacks and litigation during the Trump administration. Immigrants covered by DACA are known as Dreamers.

DACA was put in place as a temporary stopgap in 2012, giving the right to work and study, and deferral from potential deportation, to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors before 2007.

According to a new report by FWD.us, a tech industry-linked immigration advocacy group, U.S. high schools this spring will grant diplomas to 100,000 young undocumented immigrants.

Only a quarter of 2022 undocumented graduates would be eligible for DACA, making it the first graduating class since the policys been in place to have a majority of post-DACA undocumented graduates.

But the federal government is only allowed to process DACA renewals because of a court ruling, meaning even Dreamers who arrived before 2007 and are technically eligible for DACA cannot sign onto the program.

As the DACA eligibility date fades into the past, upcoming high school classes will have a higher number of post-DACA graduates; more than 600,000 undocumented students are currently enrolled in K-12 schools in the United States, according to FWD.us data.

Of those 600,000, only about 21,000 are already enrolled in the program and potentially eligible for renewals, according to government data.

The post-DACA Dreamers face different challenges depending on their state of residence.

According to the study, around 43,000 Dreamers in the class of 2022 live in the 28 states that dont provide in-state tuition for undocumented students, meaning theyll be barred from working legally and will have to pay full tuition to attend state schools.

I am a part of the generation of Dreamers that have been left out of the DACA program because I arrived in the U.S after 2007. Graduating from high school as an undocumented student was extremely daunting and heartbreaking, said Karen Nuez Sifuentes, program and engagement coordinator at ConVivir Colorado, a leadership program for immigrant students.

I was accepted to the school of my dreams but was unable to attend because I did not qualify for financial aid due to my status, added Nuez.

While Nuez did graduate college at MCU Denver, she was unable to continue a career in science because she could not work at federally funded labs.

Nuezs experience is typical of Dreamers who lack DACA protections.

Barred from working or for the most part from adjusting their immigrant status, non-DACA Dreamers must seek out work in places that dont require work authorization or find ways to pay tuition in the hope that DACA protections will be extended in the future.

But DACA is buried under a pile of legal action stemming from the Trump administrations efforts to end the policy, and legislation on the matter is unlikely, at least in the short term.

The federal government is currently prohibited by a court ruling from extending DACA to new beneficiaries, and the entire program could be struck down by the courts.

Still, amid record low unemployment and a continued sense of public sympathy for Dreamers, advocates are pushing Congress to tackle the low hanging fruit in immigration, including DACA and backlogs for certain work visa holders and their families.

Last month, a bipartisan group led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) started immigration reform talks to gauge a path forward for a series of targeted House-passed immigration reform bills.

Continue reading here:
Around 100,000 Dreamers to graduate without shot at work permits - The Hill

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GONZALES, Calif. It looks like a century-old picture of farming in California: a few dozen Mexican men on their knees, plucking radishes from the ground, tying them into bundles. But the crews on Sabor Farms radish patch, about a mile south of the Salinas River, represent the cutting edge of change, a revolution in how America pulls food from the land.

For starters, the young men on their knees are working alongside technology unseen even 10 years ago. Crouched behind what looks like a tractor retrofitted with a packing plant, they place bunches of radishes on a conveyor belt within arms reach, which carries them through a cold wash and delivers them to be packed into crates and delivered for distribution in a refrigerated truck.

The other change is more subtle, but no less revolutionary. None of the workers are in the United States illegally.

Both of these transformations are driven by the same dynamic: the decline in the supply of young illegal immigrants from Mexico, the backbone of the work force picking Californias crops since the 1960s.

The new demographic reality has sent farmers scrambling to bring in more highly paid foreign workers on temporary guest-worker visas, experiment with automation wherever they can and even replace crops with less labor-intensive alternatives.

Back in the day, you had people galore, said Vanessa Quinlan, director of human resources at Sabor Farms. These days, not so much: Some 90 percent of Sabors harvest workers come from Mexico on temporary visas, said Jess Quinlan, the farms president and Ms. Quinlans husband. We needed to make sure we had bodies available when the crop is ready, he said.

For all the anxiety over the latest surge in immigration, Mexicans who constitute most of the unauthorized immigrants in the United States and most of the farmworkers in California are not coming in the numbers they once did.

There are a variety of reasons: The aging of Mexicos population slimmed the cohort of potential migrants. Mexicos relative stability after the financial crises of the 1980s and 1990s reduced the pressures for them to leave, while the collapse of the housing bubble in the United States slashed demand for their work north of the border. Stricter border enforcement by the United States, notably during the Trump administration, has further dented the flow.

The Mexican migration wave to the United States has now crested, the economists Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh wrote.

As a consequence, the total population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States peaked in 2007 and has declined slightly since then. California felt it first. From 2010 to 2018, the unauthorized immigrant population in the state declined by some 10 percent, to 2.6 million. And the dwindling flow sharply reduced the supply of young workers to till fields and harvest crops on the cheap.

The state reports that from 2010 to 2020, the average number of workers on California farms declined to 150,000 from 170,000. The number of undocumented immigrant workers declined even faster. The Labor Departments most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey reports that in 2017 and 2018, unauthorized immigrants accounted for only 36 percent of crop workers hired by California farms. That was down from 66 percent, according to the surveys performed 10 years earlier.

The immigrant work force has also aged. In 2017 and 2018, the average crop worker hired locally on a California farm was 43, according to the survey, eight years older than in the surveys performed from 2007 to 2009. The share of workers under the age of 25 dropped to 7 percent from a quarter.

Desperate to find an alternative, farms turned to a tool they had largely shunned for years: the H-2A visa, which allows them to import workers for a few months of the year.

The visa was created during the immigration reform of 1986 as a concession to farmers who complained that the legalization of millions of unauthorized immigrants would deprive them of their labor force, as newly legalized workers would seek better jobs outside agriculture.

But farmers found the H-2A process too expensive. Under the rules, they had to provide H-2A workers with housing, transportation to the fields and even meals. And they had to pay them the so-called adverse effect wage rate, calculated by the Agriculture Department to ensure they didnt undercut the wages of domestic workers.

May 27, 2022, 3:14 p.m. ET

It remained cheaper and easier for farmers to hire the younger immigrants who kept on coming illegally across the border. (Employers must demand documents proving workers eligibility to work, but these are fairly easy to fake.)

That is no longer the case. There are some 35,000 workers on H-2A visas across California, 14 times as many as in 2007. During the harvest they crowd the low-end motels dotting Californias farm towns. A 1,200-bed housing facility exclusive to H-2A workers just opened in Salinas. In King City, some 50 miles south, a former tomato processing shed was retrofitted to house them.

In the United States we have an aging and settled illegal work force, said Philip Martin, an expert on farm labor and migration at the University of California, Davis. The fresh blood are the H-2As.

Immigrant guest workers are unlikely to fill the labor hole on Americas farms, though. For starters, they are costlier than the largely unauthorized workers they are replacing. The adverse effect wage rate in California this year is $17.51, well above the $15 minimum wage that farmers must pay workers hired locally.

So farmers are also looking elsewhere. We are living on borrowed time, said Dave Puglia, president and chief executive of Western Growers, the lobby group for farmers in the West. I want half the produce harvest mechanized in 10 years. Theres no other solution.

Produce that is hardy or doesnt need to look pretty is largely harvested mechanically already, from processed tomatoes and wine grapes to mixed salad greens and tree nuts. Sabor Farms has been using machines to harvest salad mix for decades.

Processed food is mostly automated, said Walt Duflock, who runs Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology in Salinas, a point for tech entrepreneurs to meet farmers. Now the effort is on the fresh side.

Apples are being grown on trellises for easy harvesting. Scientists have developed genetically modified high rise broccoli with long stems to be harvested mechanically. Pruning and trimming of trees and vines is increasingly automated. Lasers have been brought into fields for weeding. Biodegradable plant tape packed with seeds and nutrients can now be germinated in nurseries and transplanted with enormous machines that just unspool the tape into the field.

A few rows down from the crew harvesting radish bunches at Sabor Farms patch, the Quinlans are running a fancy automatic radish harvester they bought from the Netherlands. Operated by three workers, it plucks individual radishes from the ground and spews them into crates in a truck driving by its side.

And yet automation has limits. Harvesting produce that cant be bruised or butchered by a robot remains a challenge. A survey by the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology found that about two-thirds of growers of specialty crops like fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts have invested in automation over the last three years. Still, they expect that only about 20 percent of the lettuce, apple and broccoli harvest and none of the strawberry harvest will be automated by 2025.

Some crops are unlikely to survive. Acreage devoted to crops like bell peppers, broccoli and fresh tomatoes is declining. And foreign suppliers are picking up much of the slack. Fresh and frozen fruit and vegetable imports almost doubled over the last five years, to $31 billion in 2021.

Consider asparagus, a particularly labor-intensive crop. Only 4,000 acres of it were harvested across the state in 2020, down from 37,000 two decades earlier. The state minimum wage of $15, added to the new requirement to pay overtime after 40 hours a week, is squeezing it further after growers in the Mexican state of Sinaloa where workers make some $330 a month increased the asparagus acreage almost threefold over 15 years, to 47,000 acres in 2020.

H-2A workers wont help fend off the cheaper Mexican asparagus. They are even more expensive than local workers, about half of whom are immigrants from earlier waves that gained legal status; about a third are undocumented. And capital is not rushing in to automate the crop.

There are no unicorns there, said Neill Callis, who manages the asparagus packing shed at the Turlock Fruit Company, which grows some 300 acres of asparagus in the San Joaquin Valley east of Salinas. You cant seduce a V.C. with the opportunity to solve a $2-per-carton problem for 50 million cartons, he said.

While Turlock has automated where it can, introducing a German machine to sort, trim and bunch spears in the packing shed, the harvest is still done by hand hunched workers walk up the rows stabbing at the spears with an 18-inch-long knife.

These days, Mr. Callis said, Turlock is hanging on to the asparagus crop mainly to ensure its labor supply. Providing jobs during the asparagus harvest from February to May helps the farm hang on to its regular workers 240 in the field and about 180 in the shed it co-owns with another farm for the critical summer harvest of 3,500 acres of melons.

Losing its source of cheap illegal immigrant workers will change California. Other employers heavily reliant on cheap labor like builders, landscapers, restaurants and hotels will have to adjust.

Paradoxically, the changes raking across Californias fields seem to threaten the undocumented local work force farmers once relied on. Ancelmo Zamudio from Chilapa, in Mexicos state of Guerrero, and Jos Luis Hernndez from Ejutla in Oaxaca crossed into the United States when they were barely in their teens, over 15 years ago. Now they live in Stockton, working mostly on the vineyards in Lodi and Napa.

They were building a life in the United States. They brought their wives with them; had children; hoped that they might be able to legalize their status somehow, perhaps through another shot at immigration reform like the one of 1986.

Things to them look decidedly cloudier. We used to prune the leaves on the vine with our hands, but they brought in the robots last year, Mr. Zamudio complained. They said it was because there were no people.

Mr. Hernndez grumbles about H-2A workers, who earn more even if they have less experience, and dont have to pay rent or support a family. He worries about rising rents pushed higher by new arrivals from the Bay Area. The rule compelling farmers to pay overtime after 40 hours of work per week is costing him money, he complains, because farmers slashed overtime and cut his workweek from six days to five.

He worries about the future. It scares me that they are coming with H-2As and also with robots, he said. Thats going to take us down.

See the original post here:
Illegal Immigration Is Down, Changing the Face of California Farms - The New York Times

Farmworkers near Fresno, Calif., pick paper trays of dried raisins off the ground and heap them onto a trailer in the final step of raisin harvest on Sept. 24, 2013. Gosia Wozniacka/AP hide caption

Farmworkers near Fresno, Calif., pick paper trays of dried raisins off the ground and heap them onto a trailer in the final step of raisin harvest on Sept. 24, 2013.

Federal reforms for farmworkers are in the works following a blockbuster human trafficking case out of Georgia late last year. That case highlighted loopholes for abuse in the federal visa program that provides workers to farms and meat processing plants.

In a letter sent to Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the department is preparing to take the first step toward creating a rule reforming the H-2A and H-2B nonimmigrant worker visas.

The letter comes alongside others sent to Ossoff throughout May from the Labor and State Departments in response to his questions about steps the federal government is taking to protect farm and food system workers.

Ossoff wrote to the agencies in March following the indictment of two dozen defendants in a multi-year human trafficking case in Georgia that found the defendants allegedly defrauded the government of over 70,000 H-2A visas forcing hundreds of workers to illegally work on Georgia onion farms. The case reignited advocates' push for increased labor protections among America's essential farmworkers.

In the Georgia case, dubbed Operation Blooming Onion, the working conditions were described as "modern day slavery" as workers faced wage theft and physical abuse and were illegally transported; two died due to heat exposure. According to an indictment, 24 farm labor contractors and recruiters allegedly demanded workers pay illegal fees, held their identification documents hostage, required physically demanding work for little or no pay and housed workers "in crowded, unsanitary, and degrading living conditions." According to the indictment, workers were threatened with deportation and violence while the defendants profited $200 million.

"The commitment that I have received to engage in new rulemaking suggests that in response to my inquiry they are planning to undertake reforms to protect the human rights of migrant farmworkers in the United States," Ossoff told NPR in an interview, adding he still wants to see what specific rulemaking the agency plans to make.

Currently, farmers and ranchers are able to resource the H-2A visa program if they need workers to perform seasonal or temporary agricultural labor so long as they can prove that they were not able to hire a domestic worker, among other requirements. While H-2B visas are considered "nonagricultural," nurseries, meatpacking and seafood processing plants use them across the country.

The demand for agricultural workforce visas has been steadily on the rise as producers face continued labor shortages, even before the pandemic. Most recently, the Labor Department noted the number of H-2A visas has more than tripled since 2012.

Employees with these kinds of agriculture labor visas make up a small portion of the overall agriculture labor force, nearly half which is estimated to be made up of undocumented workers, according to the Labor Department. But abuses still occur even through the legal federal program aimed at providing labor.

Over 70 percent of DOL investigations find workplace violations, with 30 percent of investigations finding employers have committed five or more violations, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed DOL data.

Though the case in Georgia is among the most extreme, since the start of the Biden administration, the DOL's Wage and Hour Division, one of the branches that investigates workplace abuses, has concluded 573 H-2A investigations, resulting in over $9 million in back wages for more than 10,000 workers. Additionally, the agency has assessed over $8.8 million in civil money penalties for H-2A violations, according to the DOL letter written to Ossoff by WHD Acting Administrator Jessica Looman.

According to Mayorkas in the letter, the proposed rulemaking process, which could still take years, would address some of the biggest issues brought to light in Operation Blooming Onion, such as workers being overcharged and issued illegal fees for visas and facing salary shortages.

In addition, Mayorkas said the department is looking for ways to improve oversight of the H-2A program and improve workers' participation in investigations. The move is also in line with President Joe Biden's campaign promises to strengthen protections for farmworkers, while waiting on Congress to move forward with immigration reform.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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DHS tells Sen. Jon Ossoff it will reform the agricultural visa program. - NPR