Florida’s fruit and vegetable growers say their biggest challenge is ensuring they have enough workers to pick their crops and get them onto grocery shelves.
“The whole immigration reform issue needs to be addressed at the federal level,” said Marie Bedner, whose family owns Bedner’s Farm Fresh Market west of Boynton Beach. “In Georgia, they had no labor to pick the crops. They rotted in the field.”
Two labor experts told Bedner and other growers at the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association’s 68th annual meeting Tuesday that if E-Verify becomes mandatory, it would be a disaster for domestic farmers. E-Verify is an electronic system designed to prevent the employment of undocumented workers in the U.S. through a cross-check of Social Security numbers and names.
A hotly contested bill moving in Congress this week would compel employers to use E-Verify.
“E-Verify is a jobs killer, but only for illegal workers,” Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said in Washington. “For Americans and legal workers, it is a jobs protector.”
Smith chairs the House Judiciary Committee and authored the Legal Workforce Act, now backed by 62 House members. His panel is scheduled to take up the bill starting today.
The bill would phase in nationwide mandatory participation over two years, covering new hires. Agricultural employers would have three years to comply, and seasonal farmworkers would be exempt as long as they kept returning to the same employer.
“The No. 1 issue facing agriculture in Florida is labor,” Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam said at the growers meeting at The Ritz-Carlton this week. Part of the problem is that agricultural producers in states where crops are not as labor-intensive do not share the same viewpoint, he said.
“We have to have all the oars in the water to help us solve this,” Putnam said.
Georgia is among 18 states that mandate some form of E-Verify use.
“In Georgia 11,000 workers were lost at the mere prospect of E-Verify,” Monte Lake, a partner with C.J. Lake LLC, a Washington law firm, told the Florida growers Tuesday.
Of the 120,000 to 150,000 workers employed in Florida agriculture, 65 percent are undocumented, said Rob Williams, director of Florida Legal Services’ Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in Tallahassee. Those workers have an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 children, most of whom are U.S. citizens, he said.
Williams wants to see workers given long-term legal status. He’d like to see the influx into the nation slowed and improved conditions for workers already here.
“Their children are here. They are not going back,” Williams said.
Lake and Williams said that waiting to totally secure the U.S.-Mexico border before getting a comprehensive immigration policy won’t work.
“The fence is not going to work as long as people are economically driven,” Lake said. “It’s an excuse to not deal with the issue.”
Williams said he doesn’t think any of the three E-Verify and foreign guest worker bills being proposed in Congress are going to pass both houses and become law.
However, Williams said, the E-Verify controversy could create an opportunity to pass other measures to solve the labor problem.
A survey of agricultural employers who use H-2A, a federal program that brings in temporary foreign workers, found that 47 percent of employers were not at all satisfied or only slightly satisfied with the program, according to the National Council of Agricultural Employers.
Seventy-two percent of growers surveyed reported that workers arrived an average of 22 days after they were needed.
“We have to have a workable program that deals with the ability to get workers here on a temporary basis,” Lake said. “These bills do not deal with the undocumented workers already here.”
McClatchy Newspapers contributed to this story.
