While Georgia’s success in attracting new businesses rightly dominates headlines, our oldest and largest industry – agriculture – struggles to find a workforce to fuel its $76 billion economic contribution.
Challenges to secure workers who plant, harvest and deliver Georgia farm products to families and businesses have long been daunting. Such worker shortages put popular and locally grown produce industry at risk.
While farms jobs usually pay substantially more than minimum wage, fewer Americans seek them. Money is not the issue. Many agricultural jobs are seasonal and transitory in nature, sometimes lasting only a few weeks or months. Foreign workers see these jobs as opportunities to provide for themselves and their families.
Current federal law provides a guest worker program, known as H-2A, that allows foreign workers to legally enter the U.S. to do farm work. Most Georgia H-2A users are large fruit and vegetable farms. Dairy and nursery operations would also benefit, but they are excluded from the program because their jobs are year-round. The number of these visa workers has grown only slightly. Georgia has lots of small farms that cannot afford the fees, housing and transportation requirements of the program in addition to the minimum wage of $10 per hour.
While some farms cannot afford a federal visa program, doing without a viable workforce is also costly. A study by the University of Georgia Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development showed that Georgia growers of seven major fruit and vegetable crops lost an estimated $140 million due to the labor shortage in the spring and summer of 2011. These crops had a total farm gate value of more than $670 million. Market prices and input costs are all lost in such a scenario, highlighting the reality that a reliable workforce is critical to the sustainability of these farms.
Recent federal legislative proposals would have met the labor needs of farmers through a “blue card” proposal. The program would not allow for amnesty; it would only allow foreign farm workers to apply for the card if they pay a fine, undergo background checks and prove they have farm work experience. A blue card would certainly not grant citizenship. It would only allow the applicant to legally remain in the country to do farm work for a limited time.
Influential business leaders nationwide have recognized the negative impact our broken system has had on our economy and call for reform this year. An efficient guest-worker program would address a labor shortage that causes a stress on the state’s largest industry, and would do so without displacing American workers.
The Georgia Agribusiness Council is one of many Georgia and national organizations that support such immigration reform. We have teamed up with manufacturing and business leaders to promote #iFarmImmigration to raise awareness of the economic harm caused by our nation’s outdated immigration system.
Please join us in letting our representatives know you support immigration reform.
Bryan Tolar is president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council.
