Farm Bureau Calls for Immigration Reform

NEW ORLEANS,
January 14, 2008


Patrick O’Brien, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, speaking at an issues conference at the organization’s 89th annual convention, cited three major points the agricultural community needs from immigration reform. Agriculture must have: a simplified guest worker program that supplies 500,000-750,000 legal migrant and stationary foreign workers for agriculture on a reliable, recurring basis; an effective guest worker wage set at the prevailing market wage; and a compromise with labor rights groups on treatment of guest workers that allows the program to work and farmers to operate.

According to O’Brien, the farm workforce has stabilized at about 3 million; 2 million farm family workers and 1 million hired workers.

“Attracting and holding 1 million American hired workers is virtually impossible even with employment alternatives and worker preferences. We see two approaches to getting there. One approach is to seek wholesale legislative reform. Alternatively, we can work at the margin, piece-by-piece on rule-making to try to make the existing program work. We’re going to continue pushing hard for wholesale legislation, but incremental changes may be what gets us where we need to go and that’s what AFBF is working to accomplish,â€