Free Republic

Philip Martin is Professor Emeritus of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Davis...Long essay, but should be of interest to anyone in the food business, and of interest to any general readers who wonder how dinner gets to the dinner table.

House Republicans have slipped a massive foreign worker expansion into their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, a blow to the GOP’s promise to protect the nation’s working class from powerful special interests. After markups and hearings, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee approved the DHS spending bill which would blow the lid off blue-collar migration caps to the United States, spurring an influx of foreign visa workers in the labor market with whom working class Americans would have to compete for jobs. “Who represents the working class? This bill suggests it’s not necessarily Republicans,” Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA...

Longtime field laborers in the Mississippi Delta said in a lawsuit that they were asked to train white guest workers from South Africa before losing their jobs to them. For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa. He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been around farming all...

Idaho GOP Sen. Mike Crapo is stepping back from his initial show of support for the Democrats’ farmworker amnesty bill, which threatens America’s rural communities by giving employers a low-wage, no-rights foreign labor force for a wide variety of agriculture jobs. “Even though Senator Crapo has said he’ll work on a Senate version of the bill, we should add he won’t support the existing House-passed version,” Lindsay Northern, Crapo’s communications director, told Breitbart News. She continued: "Senator Crapo supports helping Idaho farm producers with problems they have under the existing system, such as concerns over liability and the fact dairy...

The Justice Department announced today that it reached a settlement agreement with ASTA CRS Inc., a provider of IT staffing and consulting services with offices in Ashburn, Virginia, and Greenbelt, Maryland. This is the ninth settlement under the Civil Rights Division’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which is aimed at targeting, investigating, and taking enforcement actions against companies that discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of temporary visa workers.The settlement resolves a claim that ASTA’s Maryland office discriminated against U.S. workers because of their citizenship status when it posted a job advertisement specifying a preference for non-U.S. citizens who held...

After President Trump announced he would be suspending immigration to the United States to protect the jobs and wages of millions of newly unemployed workers during the pandemic, the Spectator USA reported an “internal battle” broke out in the White House. Sources familiar with the situation told the Spectator that Kushner “is one of the loudest voices pushing back on a full ban and is seeking to carve out exemptions for refugees, temporary workers under the H1B visa program, and farmworkers under the H-2A visa program.” If that’s true, then Kushner achieved a total victory. The ban applies only to...

A group of Representatives led by Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) recently introduced the Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA). This bill will amnesty over 1.5 million illegal alien farmworkers, expand the H-2A program, add 40,000 green cards to the EB-3 category, and mandate E-Verify across the agriculture sector. Despite its flashy name, this bill does nothing to modernize the agricultural workforce. Instead of encouraging the adoption of time- and cost-saving technology, this bill proposes amnestying millions of alien farmworkers and giving them a path to citizenship. It is a massive amnesty, plain and simple. Farmworker Amnesty The bill...

The Justice Department announced today that it filed a lawsuit against Crop Production Services Inc. (Crop Production), headquartered in Loveland, Colorado, for allegedly discriminating against U.S. workers in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The complaint alleges that in 2016, Crop Production discriminated against at least three United States citizens by refusing to employ them as seasonal technicians in El Campo, Texas, because Crop Production preferred to hire temporary foreign workers under the H-2A visa program. According to the department’s complaint, Crop Production imposed more burdensome requirements on U.S. citizens than it did on H-2A visa workers to...

The Department of Justice announced Thursday it has filed a lawsuit against a Colorado corporation for allegedly discriminating against U.S. workers. The complaint alleges that in 2016, Crop Production discriminated against at least three United States citizens by refusing to employ them as seasonal technicians in El Campo, Texas, because Crop Production preferred to hire temporary foreign workers under the H-2A visa program. “In the spirit of President Trump’s Executive Order on Buy American and Hire American, the Department of Justice will not tolerate employers who discriminate against U.S. workers because of a desire to hire temporary foreign visa holders,”...

The cap that President Trump has refused to lift on H-2B visas has forced companies all over the United States to do the unthinkable and hire American workers! What’s worse is that they are complaining that they have to pay American workers more…Tell me again; didn’t someone say that immigration was good for Americans? Is this not irrefutable evidence that the low-skilled (or living in low-opportunity areas) workers are being squeezed out of the job market by workers who are willing to take a lower wage? Isn’t this known as wage-suppression? The fact that employers are hiring people as seasonal...

Apple growers say they could have had one of their best years ever if a shortage of workers hadn't forced them to leave some fruit on trees. Growers in Washington state, which produces about half of the nation's apples, say the labor shortage was made worse by a late start to their harvest. The growing season got off to a slow start because of a cold, wet spring, and some migrant workers didn't stick around to wait for it. But farmers say an immigration crackdown by the federal government and states such as Arizona and Alabama scared off many more...

Note: Contact info deleted by me. # Note: The following text is a quote: Secretary Napolitano Designates 11 New Countries as Eligible for H-2a and H-2b Nonimmigrant Visa Programs Release Date: January 22, 2010 For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano this week designated 11 new countries as eligible to participate in the H-2A and H-2B nonimmigrant visa programs, which allow U.S. employers to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary or seasonal jobs for which U.S. workers are not available. The 11 newly designated countries—Croatia, Ecuador, Ethiopia,...

HURON, Calif. - Weary of waiting for Congress to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, the United Farm Workers hopes to recruit Mexican laborers to pick crops on U.S. farms. The union’s efforts to import temporary workers under an existing government program follows similar moves by lawmakers in Arizona and Colorado, who are also trying to create new pathways to bring in foreign field hands without approval from Washington. This month, UFW President Arturo Rodriguez signed an agreement with the governor of the Mexican state of Michoacan to help recruit local residents to apply for temporary jobs on U.S. farms, all...

A work program widely praised by local farmers and managed by the U.S. Government is under fire from a Blount County resident who says it keeps Americans from getting jobs. Sabrina Steele is accustomed to farm work. She and her husband have a farm in southern Blount County and she says she can work a farm like anyone. "I know what it's like to throw 75-pound hay bales all afternoon in 95-degree weather," Steele said. "I've done it." Even with extensive background in agriculture and farming, Steele, a 1998 Heritage High School graduate, has not been able to find summer...

The Labor Department estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 immigrants are currently working illegally on America's farms. Many fear that the increase in internal immigration enforcement will have serious repercussions for the agricultural sector. In response to this problem, the AgJOBS Act of 2007 would have granted amnesty to the illegal immigrants who currently work in the agricultural industry. That approach was deeply flawed and irresponsible.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Labor (DOL) are now taking the correct approach by proposing changes in the H-2A Visa program. H-2A Visas are temporary visas for nonimmigrant workers who perform agricultural...

All that Eustaquio López wanted was a job. He had plenty of experience and the energy to prove himself. But he never got a chance, he said, because as a worker in the U.S. legally, the employer would have had to pay him regular wages with adequate protections — options seen as luxuries easily skirted by exploiting Mexican workers. López and 18 other South Texans, all U.S. citizens or legal residents, are suing various agricultural companies in the region and the U.S. Labor Department in federal court in Del Rio, alleging they were passed over for jobs because of their...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced today that The Farm Bill Extension Act of 2007 (H.R. 2419) is likely to come up for debate on the Senate floor during the week of November 5. Recently, Leader Reid had promised to attempt to attach the AgJOBS amnesty for illegal farmworkers to the farm bill during floor consideration. Despite the pleas of some open borders senators to forgo debate of additional amnesties this year, it appears another major Senate battle may be in the works as early as next week. CongressDaily reported this morning that although Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom...

Behind the counter at the busy Hart Lane driver testing center here, Rosa King looked over the man's fistful of documents, including a Mexican birth certificate and a separate, typewritten English translation. The translation, Ms. King explained in Spanish, was not exact enough. It would have to be redone. When the man returned, he would be eligible for a card bearing his photograph, date of birth, height, eye color and the words "Not Valid for Identification." Tennessee is one of only two states that issue two different driver's permits: a license, for citizens and permanent residents; and a certificate for...