FFVA Labor Relations Director Mike Carlton was one of a number of agriculture leaders who visited congressional offices recently to urge support for a solution for Florida agriculture’s workforce challenges and to explain the dangers of an enforcement-only approach to immigration reform.
Carlton, who sits on the National Council of Agricultural Employers’ (NCAE) Executive Committee, was joined by FFVA and NCAE member Mike Bartos of Consolidated Citrus, NCAE board member Joshua Craft of Florida Farm Bureau, and NCAE Executive Committee member Rick Hanas of A. Duda and Sons, in attending the NCAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
The three-day program focused on issues such as having an available workforce, increased immigration enforcement, and the current unworkable H-2A program. It concluded with a special meeting of NCAE’s H-2A subcommittee to discuss strategies to address the U.S. Department of Labor’s increasingly hostile approach to the H-2A program and its users.
FFVA’s Labor Relations Division works with our members to bring legal H-2A workers into the U.S. It’s an extremely difficult and costly program to use, and it has been even tougher to navigate in the past year.
Seeking A Fix
Like Arizona, Florida has become a focal point for the debate on the immigration issue, with lawmakers introducing enforcement bills. And, as in Arizona, the three pillars of our state’s economy (tourism, agriculture, and construction) all are affected by this issue. Because agriculture is the industry speaking most directly on what’s needed to fix a badly broken system, it has become the “face” of the issue. FFVA’s leadership continues to emphasize to state lawmakers and our congressional delegation that the solution lies at the federal level, not with a patchwork quilt of state laws and regulations.
FFVA is part of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform (ACIR), a national coalition of more than 300 national, regional, and state organizations whose members produce fruit and vegetables, dairy, nursery and greenhouse crops, poultry, livestock, and Christmas trees. The group recently submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement for its February hearing on the E-Verify program. In its statement, ACIR stressed that agriculture is not defending the status quo. Rather, ag employers are willing to embrace improvements as long as they include adequate, usable programs to allow them to employ a sufficient workforce.
The Big Picture
Piecemeal, enforcement-only efforts will have broad unintended consequences to sectors of agriculture whose production methods are labor-intensive, ACIR argues. Growers will lose their workforce and their ability to produce crops. Millions of jobs that depend on agriculture will be lost (think equipment manufacturers, banks, agrichemical suppliers, and many others). The USDA estimates that every agricultural job supports three or four “downstream” jobs. Most serious of all, without an adequate ag workforce, America will come to rely more and more on other countries to feed our families.
ACIR’s statement concludes that “the facts are stark. Mandatory use of E-Verify without reforms to provide an adequate, properly authorized workforce will devastate agriculture.” Such an approach, ACIR says, will “accelerate changes already under way that are not in the national interest.”
Last November’s elections resulted in a large slate of new lawmakers in Tallahassee and Washington. FFVA is working to educate them on the unique challenges agricultural employers face on these very tough issues. We urge you to do the same by contacting your elected officials and telling your story. They need to hear from you how this will affect your business, your family, and your community.
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FFVA On The Line: Working Through Labor Issues
Lisa Lochridge is the former director of public affairs for the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association and president of the Agriculture Institute of Florida.
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March 17, 2011 