10/7/2007: Security News Brief: Behind the Scene; Bush Rewriting
Immigration Laws For Farmers:

With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested
fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has
begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that
restrict how foreign laborers can legally be brought into the country.

The effort, urgently underway at the departments of Homeland Security,
State and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vise
between a complex process to hire legal guest workers and stepped-up
enforcement that has reduced the number of illegal planters, pickers
and middle managers crossing the border.

"It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay
competitive," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "As the
southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult
time finding a workforce, and that is a factor of what is going on
today." The push to speedily rewrite the regulations is also the Bush
administration's attempt to step into a breach left when Congress did
not pass an immigration overhaul in June that might have helped
American farms. Almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be
illegal immigrants.

On all sides of the farm industry, the administration's behind-the-
scenes initiative to revamp H-2A farmworker visas is fraught with
anxiety. Advocates for immigrants fear the changes will come at the
expense of worker protections because the administration has received
and is reportedly acting on extensive input from farm lobbyists. And
farmers in areas such as the San Joaquin Valley, which is experiencing
a 20%% labor shortfall, worry the administration's changes will not
happen soon enough for the 2008 growing season.

"It's like a ticking time bomb that's going to go off," said Luawanna
Hallstrom, chief operating officer of Harry Singh & Sons, a third-
generation family farm in Oceanside that grows tomatoes. "I'm looking
at my fellow farmers and saying, 'Oh my God, what's going on?' "

Officials at the three federal agencies are scrutinizing the
regulations to see whether they can adjust the farmworker program, an
unwieldy system used by less than 2%% of American farms to bring in
foreign workers. They are considering a series of changes, including
lengthening the time workers can stay, expanding the types of work
they can do, simplifying how their applications are processed, and
redefining terms such as "temporary."

Administration sources said they were moving aggressively. They
declined to discuss details of the proposals.

The agencies are also working on possible changes to a separate visa
program, H-2B, which brings in seasonal workers for resorts, clam-
shucking operations and horse stables, among other businesses.

The administration has pursued the project discreetly. The issue of
immigration has generated friction between President Bush and the
conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has strongly opposed
many of the initiatives that Bush has pursued.

The changes to the H-2A visa program comprise one of more than two
dozen initiatives the administration announced in August. Most of the
initiatives dealt with increased enforcement, the most prominent being
a measure that would force employers to either fire workers for whom
they've received "no match" notification (indicating their W-2 data
don't match Social Security Administration records) or face punitive
action from the Department of Homeland Security. When Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the enforcement push, he
also acknowledged the problems that agriculture reported.

"Even putting aside no-match letters, just our increased work at the
border was actually causing a drop in the number of workers coming
across," Chertoff said.

David James, an assistant secretary of Labor, said Bush asked his
department, which has jurisdiction over most H-2A rules, to review the
entire program. The agency "is now in the process of identifying ways
the program can be improved to provide farmers with an orderly and
timely flow of legal workers while protecting the rights of both U.S.
workers and foreign temporary workers," James said.

The current program, managed by all three agencies, is famously
dysfunctional.

Farmers have to apply for workers about a month in advance, but the
agencies often fail to coordinate their response in time for the
harvest, which farmers can't always predict. At Hallstrom's farm,
where tidy rows of tomato plants run almost to the ocean's edge, half
of the 1,000 workers are in the H-2A program. (Nationally, about
60,000 H-2A applications a year are usually filed, compared with more
than 3 million farm jobs to be filled. There is no cap on the number
of H-2A workers allowed into the U.S.)

She remembers submitting an emergency request for H-2A workers one
year and getting the visas 60 days later. She said the laborers spent
two weeks pulling rotten fruit off the vines, and the farm lost $2.5
million. "Devastating," Hallstrom said.

Growers also complain about paying for workers' housing,
transportation, visas and other fees. Harry Yates, a North Carolina
Christmas-tree grower, estimates that his labor costs for H-2A workers
are $14 an hour, compared with a competitor whose illegal laborers
cost about $7.50 an hour. Like other farmers, Yates said using the
H-2A program was an invitation to lawsuits from worker advocates and
frequent government investigations.

"I understand why so many growers are afraid to use this program. It
is too expensive, too complicated, too slow and too likely to land you
in court," said Yates.

Some advocates for workers fiercely dispute this. They say farmers
just want to keep wages low.

"The employers want to be free of government oversight, legal-services
representation for the guest workers, and other efforts to enforce the
modest H-2A worker protections," said Bruce Goldstein, executive
director of the advocacy group Farmworker Justice, which is affiliated
with the nonprofit National Council of La Raza.

Industry lobbyists have sent the Bush administration a set of detailed
suggestions for overhauling the H-2A program through administrative
changes, which could take weeks to put in place, and through changes
in the regulations, a process that takes months.

Some of the suggestions under consideration include changing the
procedures farmers must use to try to hire U.S. citizens first.
Currently farmers have to advertise the jobs, then submit applications
to Labor and Homeland Security to bring in foreign workers. Growers
would prefer to move to a system in which they pledged that they had
done all they could to recruit U.S. workers, but no longer had to
submit an application to Labor.

Other changes under consideration would simplify the detailed H-2A
housing requirements, extend the definition of "temporary" beyond 10
months, and expand the definition of "agricultural" workers to include
such industries as meatpacking and poultry processing.
Source: Morning Security News Brief via Security News Wire