Farmers continue to mobilize against a bill that would require them, when hiring new employees, to use the Department of Homeland Security's "e-Verify" database aimed at illegal immigrants. The bill, sponsored by Republican Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, would give farmers three years to comply, but that does little to reassure farmers, Jesse McKinley and Julia Preston of The New York Times report.
Farmers say the bill "could cripple a $390 billion industry that relies on hundreds of thousands of willing low-wage immigrant workers to pick, sort and package everything from avocados to zucchini," McKinley and Preston write. George Bonacich, a farmer in Patterson, Calif., 80 miles east of San Francisco, relies on 100 farmhands to pick 50 to 100 tons of apricots each day. "If we don't have enough labor at peak time, the fruit goes on the ground," Bonacich told the Times. (Times photo by Jim Wilson: sorting dried apricots on Bonacich's farm)
Smith, who has the support of some restaurant owners and home builders, said he would introduce another bill proposing changes to the temporary farm worker program known as H-2A or offer a new guest-worker program to meet agriculture's needs, the Times reports.
The bill seems likely to pass the Republican-controlled House but may fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate over fears about lost tax revenue from illegal immigrants' paycheck deductions, McKinley and Preston write. Paul Wenger, president of the California Farm Bureau, says this may result in a shift in the agriculture community's political support. "Most of our folks are Republicans," he told the Times. "But if they do this to them without a workable worker program, it will change their voting patterns, or at the very least their involvement in politics." (Read more)
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