By ELIZABETH BEWLEY, Gannett Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - As shortages of workers have intensified on Henderson County apple orchards and farms across the country, congressional panels have turned their attention toward proposals to fix the problem.
Local growers say it’s about time.
“Something’s got to change as far as policy that allows guest worker programs,” said Anthony Owens, owner of Windy Ridge Farms in Hendersonville and president of the Blue Ridge Apple Growers Association. “One side wants this, one side wants that, and nobody can meet in the middle. It’s not creating what agriculture needs for a work visa program.”
Growers and agricultural experts echoed those thoughts at a Senate hearing this week on farm labor shortages. Without a simpler way to legally hire foreign workers, they said, any measures to crack down on illegal farm workers would crush growers.
More than 1.4 million people work on fields in the U.S. each year -- 75,000 in North Carolina -- according to labor researchers. The Labor Department estimates that more than half of them are here illegally, although growers’ groups place that number at closer to 70 percent.
A House committee approved a measure designed to lower those numbers two weeks ago. The bill, sponsored by immigration hardliner Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, would require employers to use an electronic database called E-Verify to determine whether employees are eligible to work in the U.S.
Growers say Henderson County already has trouble attracting farm workers because it’s a “287(g)” county - a federal holding and transportation hub for undocumented workers arrested in the mountains.
Adding E-Verify would make things worse, they say.
“A lot of these guys are bypassing Henderson County altogether in fear of the 287(g) program. Then you add E-Verify on top of that, it cranks it up another notch,” said Owens. “It makes you wonder, for next year, is labor going to be in even shorter supply?”
The county’s 5,000 acres of orchards produce more apples than any other county in the state and bring in roughly $25 million each year. North Carolina is the seventh-largest apple producer in the nation.
As pressure from farmers has mounted, lawmakers have searched for ways to soften the blow of stricter immigration enforcement with a simpler guest worker program.
A proposal by Smith would revise the existing program, known as H-2A, to remove some procedural hurdles, shift management of the program from the Labor Department to the Agriculture Department and lower the cost of employing workers through the program.
North Carolina employs more workers through the H-2A program than any other state - more than 8,500. The roughly 700 farmers in the North Carolina Growers Association employ more than 6,000 of those workers, making the group the single biggest program participant in the country.
The association supports Smith’s proposal to revise H-2A, which is “too expensive, too bureaucratic and too litigious,” said deputy director Lee Wicker.
Farmers participating in the program must pay at least $9.30 an hour and provide employees with housing and transportation from the border - costs that add up to about $950 per worker, Wicker said.
That means growers using the H-2A program pay almost twice as much as growers employing illegal workers at minimum wage, he told House lawmakers at a hearing last month.
His organization supports E-Verify because it would help the farmers he represents to compete with farmers who hire illegally.
“We’re committed to complying with the law, and we’re not scared of E-Verify provided you give us a workable guest program,” he said. “I think that’s where most farmers are.”
Other lawmakers have proposed scrapping the H2-A program completely.
A bill introduced last month by Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., would allow workers to come to the U.S. for 10 months to work for any agricultural employer. Current law ties workers to one employer for the duration of their stay in the U.S.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she plans to introduce a bill next week that would issue five-year, counterfeit-proof “blue cards” to foreign agricultural workers.
Owens said such programs would be simpler and more flexible, especially because they would allow foreign farm employees to work for more than one U.S. grower.
“We only pick apples three or four months out of the year,” he said. “I can’t afford to pay someone all year for four months of work.”
Owens said he hopes an improved guest worker program would ease shortages caused by Henderson County’s 287(g) designation.
“If the program is simplified, you’d think you’d almost see the 287(g) program done away with completely, because at that point most people would be documented legally to be here,” he said.
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Contact Elizabeth Bewley at ebewley@gannett.com
