E-Verify likely to hurt agriculture
U.S. farmers employ around 1.6 million seasonal farm workers a year, but most of them are not authorized to work in the United States. With about 85 percent of farm laborers foreign born, it is estimated that 75 percent are working illegally. Yet agricultural employers have to walk a fine line between compliance and not being discriminatory – doing their due diligence to make sure employees are documented, but bound to take documentation at its face value.
That’s where the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ E-Verify program comes in. It offers a free, Internet based verification service to see if employees are authorized to work in the United States. The program currently is voluntary, but two bills have been proposed in Congress – one in the House and one in Senate – and a few states are considering mandated E-Verify or have already passed the legislations.
For growers like Tony DiMare, vice president of The DiMare Co., a fresh grower, packer and shipper of vegetables and citrus with farms in California, Florida and South Carolina, the threat of mandated E-Verify comes at an already tenuous time for agriculture.
“We are all very aware and very concerned that e-verify at a national level is right around the corner,” DiMare said in a June 28 webinar hosted by the United Fresh Produce Association.
DiMare employs about 2,000 seasonal workers to harvest crops each season. As the California tomato harvest gets going, DiMare said there has already been some labor shortages and other growers are increasing their wage rates to attract and retain field workers. DiMare has decided to cut back on vegetable acreage this season due to concerns about the labor shortfalls.
“I only see it getting worse going forward,” he said.
Without a viable guest worker program, DiMare said national E-Verify is a real concern, and it puts growers in a very difficult position.
“I don’t know how as an industry we can continue to grow crops to be harvested,” he said.
The state of Georgia passed HB87 on May 13, which was a two-part bill with an immigration enforcement section and an E-Verify section, said Charles Hall, executive director for the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association.
“We were fighting the e-verify section much harder than the enforcement section, but as we found out, it was the enforcement section that came back to bite us,” he said.
Less than a week after the bill passed, Georgia growers found that workers were either leaving the state or bypassing it. There was an estimated 30 percent to 50 percent labor shortage during the spring, and by the end May the governor called for a report on the labor situation from the Commissioner of Agriculture. The state reported 11,000 farm employment opportunities in June, and even attempted a probationers worker program through the Department of Corrections at address the shortages. Most growers left product in the fields, Hall said, although the extent of the losses isn’t yet known. He said the dry weather and above average temperatures added to the situation, and that has put the fall acreage in question.
The immediate effect of E-Verify in Georgia has made the state the poster child for e-verify opponents. Craig Regelbrugge, co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, said this was a “teaching moment” for the rest of the country. If E-Verify works as it should, it would screen out most employees on farms, he said. It has to be part of an overall solution that includes a guest worker program.
“Our industry and coalition has always been open to E-Verify enforcement or something similar, as long as it is accompanied by a workable labor supply solution,” Regelbrugge said.
The current H2A program is not a solution, he said. It is too bureaucratic and inflexible, but if a new program isn’t created, then food would move offshore. The bills in the U.S. House and Senate don’t provide a way for workers to stay legally, and that could have dire consequences on agriculture if and when E-Verify is mandated.
