Thread: No Immigration Reform May Cost NY Farms

New York Farmers Want More Indentured Servants and , Of Course, Illegals:

No Immigration Reform May Cost NY Farms

By WILLIAM KATES
The Associated Press
Wednesday, December 19, 2007; 3:01 AM

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Congress' failure to ensure that there are enough migrant workers in the nation's labor force could eventually cost New York agriculture hundreds of millions of dollars in lost crops and hundreds of thousands of acres in lost farmland, analysts say.

"Our country is reaping what Congress has sown," said Craig Regelbrugge, a vice president of the American Nursery and Landscape Association and co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, a national coalition of more than 300 agricultural producer associations.

The federal government's failure to deal with immigration reform _ particularly ensuring there are enough legal migrant farm workers for agricultural states like New York _ "constitutes nothing short of a national emergency," Regelbrugge said Tuesday during an agribusiness conference at Cornell University.

The annual conference also took up other farm issues _ soaring fuel costs, collapsed housing prices and the impact of biofuel on livestock feed costs.

But access to migrant labor is critical for agriculture, which differs from other economic sectors in that most farm work is seasonal. In the 1990s, the American economy created more jobs than it had domestic workers, leaving agriculture even more reliant on an illegal labor force.

Nationwide, there are about 1.6 million full-time farm workers, said Regelbrugge. About 80 percent of those workers are foreign born _ and nearly seven out of ten are working illegally, he said.

Despite repeated attempts, Congress and the Bush administration have been unable to come up with a long-term strategy on immigration reform and the current temporary worker program is "hobbled by bureaucracy, excessive and burdensome paperwork and restrictive wages," Regelbrugge said.

"The situation in agriculture is bad and deteriorating and agriculture needs relief," he said.

Data collected by the Farm Credit Association of New York indicates that failing to develop a functional immigration worker program could cripple operations on over 800 New York farms and put sales of approximately $700 million of agricultural products at risk, said Regelbrugge.

Without enough workers, as much as 750,000 acres of farmland could be converted to less labor-intensive _ and less profitable _ crops, while as many as 16,000 jobs that depend on the farm sector could be lost, he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported there were approximately 35,000 farms in New York in 2006, down about 600 from 2005. Those farms produced roughly $3.7 billion in products on about 7.5 million acres.

Reports from around the state indicated that labor supplies were sufficient this year, said Thomas Maloney, a senior extension associate in applied economics at Cornell who studies agriculture-immigration issues in New York. Maloney said he knew of no reports of measurable economic losses due to labor shortages.

But he said surveys showed the lack of reform has led to anxiety among growers, who worry that they will not have enough workers for future harvests.

"As a result of immigration enforcement activities, New York's farm managers are beginning to make choices they would not otherwise make," Maloney said. Such choices include holding off expansion plans, exploring alternative labor pools, and switching to less labor-intensive crops.

Maloney said Cornell researchers are trying to come up with an exact number of unauthorized immigrant farm workers in New York. In a survey last year of 105 Hispanic dairy farm workers, Maloney found nearly two-thirds were in the U.S. illegally.

If the federal government cannot resolve the larger issue of immigration reform, it should at least come up with a separate worker program for agriculture, Maloney and Regelbrugge said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00216.html

The farmers want slaves, not workers. Too bad for them, if they don't have enough workers, then close the business!

Aren't these workers only needed for a few weeks during planting and harvesting season? So in effect the taxpayers of NY must foot the costs for these IA's the rest of the year. I'm betting that cost is much more than what the farmers are saving in cheap labor.