The recent murder of Mollie Tibbetts has drawn attention to one of the worst-kept secrets in agriculture: the common practice of hiring undocumented immigrants as farmworkers. Cristhian Rivera, who has been charged with the jogger's murder, is an undocumented Mexican immigrant who worked at
Yarrabee Farms outside of Brooklyn, Iowa. The
Labor Department conservatively
estimates that 47 percent of the nation's 1.4 million field workers -- about 685,000 workers -- are undocumented. Mostly because of lobbying from the agricultural industry, lawmakers and presidents have treated farmworkers more generously than other undocumented immigrants. For instance, a failed 2013 bipartisan immigration bill would have given ag workers and their families legal status and a path to citizenship, Alan Gomez
reports for
USA Today.
"Many Republicans are citing Tibbetts' death as a reason to pass a bill requiring all U.S. companies to use
the federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of all job applicants. But even that bill –
the Legal Workforce Act filed by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas – gives farmers 2.5 years before they must start vetting their field workers, the only such exception," Gomez reports.
But farmers, ranchers and other business owners that rely on undocumented immigrants say they're already struggling to find enough legal workers, and that requiring them to use E-Verify without any other changes to the immigration system would hurt them. "Farmers across the country saw exactly what would happen if the government took an enforcement-only approach after Arizona passed an anti-immigration bill in 2010, leading a half-dozen states to follow suit," Gomez reports. "The laws, which included the requirement that all businesses use the E-Verify system, sent undocumented immigrants out of those states in droves."
Finding legal immigrants or native-born Americans to fill the gap has been unsuccessful. Farmers say the solution is a nationwide guest-worker program that eliminates some of the bureaucratic headaches of the current H2A program, Gomez reports.
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2LDTWZN Mollie Tibbetts murder draws attention to common practice of hiring undocumented immigrants as farmworkers -
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