Find ways to admit immigrant workers

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20100517/OPINION01/305179994/-1/opinion

'Ag Jobs' bill
Find ways to admit immigrant workers

Throughout the United States for years, foreign workers have been instrumental in harvesting fruits and vegetables. Locally, Mexican laborers have milked cows on area dairy farms.

Farmers have said that immigrant workers are doing the labor-intensive farm jobs that most Americans do not want to do. The apples need to be picked, the cabbage cut, the strawberries weeded. These chores need to be done at precise times — and cannot be postponed.

Yet the general crackdown on illegal immigration and problems with a visa program for temporary workers are complicating producers' operations. In some cases, fruit and vegetable growers have cut back production because they did not expect to have the workers necessary to harvest their crops.

The problem has manifested itself in New York and Washington state's apple orchards, in California's asparagus fields and even vegetable farms in Vermont, according to a recent Associated Press article. Those are just examples: Many more farm operations could be added.
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From 2005 to 2007, more than half of the crop workers hired in the United States were here illegally, according to the National Agricultural Worker Survey.

That is why some in the U.S. Senate, including Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., are backing an "Ag Jobs" bill that would provide undocumented immigrants working on farms a chance to gain legal status. It would introduce a program to bring temporary farm workers into the country.

The measure would also help dairy farms hire immigrant workers to year-round jobs on a temporary basis by applying the H-2A guest worker program to dairy farms for the first time.

The agricultural jobs are available. The food to be produced is valuable. But workers are needed to harvest the crops.

Rather than shut the border to migrants skilled at this type of work, we should be looking for solutions.

The "Ag Jobs" bill should be supported.