Alert!!!: AgJobs Amnesty on the Congressional Table
From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Monday 3SEP07 2 p.m. EDT
54 million Americans not working (it's true) -- But Senate will try another amnesty this month
Many of you have written to protest the "54 million" and other numbers in the on-line petition to Presidential candidates. You are certain that we are exaggerating. But we are not. I explain lower in this email. -- ROY
DEAR FRIENDS, LET'S STOP THIS AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS, TOO!
The open-borders assault on American workers and taxpayers will resume this week when Congress returns.
Since your victory over the Comprehensive Amnesty in the Senate in June, the pro-amnesty forces have been planning and mounting their new assault.
Their own communications with their members and their comments to the media outline their plan. They will forego attempting an amnesty for the minimum of 12 million total illegal aliens. Instead, they will seek an amnesty for 1.5 million illegal farmworkers (which will also result in a few more millions of their close relatives being allowed to be amnestied or invited right away).
Please watch your Action Buffet for faxes to send and watch your in-box for emails from us with specific links to new faxes and phone requests related to stopping the Ag Amnesty this fall.
Nothing less than the level of your effort in May and June will prevent the Ag Amnesty from going through this fall!
Pro-amnesty advocacy groups are telling their members that Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Feinstein (D-Calif.) have promised them that the Ag Jobs amnesty will be attached to the farm bill this fall and be passed into law.
UNLIMITED NUMBER OF LEGAL AG WORKERS AVAILABLE -- ZERO NEED FOR AG AMNESTY
The media -- since we beat the amnesty in June -- have been pushing constant scare stories about how crops will rot in the fields and on the trees the rest of the year because the supply of illegal ag workers is dwindling.
They are using those stories to make the case that the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens now working in U.S. agriculture should be legalized and set on a path to citizenship.
POINT #1: Most of the "rotting" is mainly factual rot itself. Few reporters actually observe the rotting.
POINT #2: When crops actually don't get picked in time, it is nearly always the grower's fault for having gambled on finding illegal workers instead of using a legal guestworker program.
The federal government offers the H-2A visa which allows farmers to import unlimited numbers of foreign ag workers for specific short-term work.
Any time you see a grower quoted that he is going to lose his crop because of a lack of workers, you can know that he didn't plan ahead. If he insists on using foreign workers, he has a perfectly legal foreign guestworker program available.
POINT #3: Why don't those complaining growers use the H-2A visa program? Mostly, it is because they have to pay an almost decent wage under the program, while illegal aliens are cheaper.
POINT #4: Occasionally a story about "rotting crops" mentions that H-2A workers are available but quotes a grower claiming that the legal program is too cumbersome. Our first response is that if somebody really wants to harvest his crops he would put up with "cumbersome" to get the job done.
Nonetheless, we have worked for a few years with some of the most pro-farmer Members of Congress to streamline the H-2A program, make it faster, more dependable and remove a few somewhat outdated requirements. If the growers' lobbyists had worked with the Members of Congress, the bureaucratic red tape and unreasonable requirements already would have been removed from the guestworker program.
The ag lobbyists, however, have failed to support reforms, instead putting all their efforts into an amnesty for the illegal workers their clients already are hiring.
Let me quickly say that we have many indications that most farmers in America oppose amnesty for illegal alien ag workers.
But their lobbyists are relentless in being the wedge for the open-borders enthusiasts who eventually want a free flow of foreign labor across our borders and competing directly with American workers in all occupations.
MAIN POINT: Some of you may be tempted to sit this fight out because you don't think there is any harm to flooding the ag job occupation with foreign workers -- because you can't imagine Americans doing farm work.
First, the Department of Labor finds that the majority of farm workers (about 55%) in the U.S. are native-born Americans!
Surely on Labor Day, we can stipulate that the government should not be driving down the incomes of these American farm workers (nor should it be driving down the incomes of permanently settled LEGAL foreign-born farm workers.
While we at NumbersUSA question the need or the advisability of large-scale foreign ag worker importation, we support efforts to drive all such hiring through legal programs that are designed to minimize the negative effect on our American native and legal immigrant ag workers.
It is time for the 1.5 million or more illegal ag workers to go home. To the extent, legal U.S. residents can't be found to replace them, that can be handled through the existing legal foreign worker program.
Farmers who have routinely broken immigration laws by hiring illegal aliens often argue that they don't want legal workers because they are used to the illegal ones they have been using for a long time. Even that wish can be handled through the existing program. If the illegals go home, the farmers can specifically recruit their former illegal workers through H-2A. But those workers would then have to be paid legal rates and they would have to abide byt he rules, including going back home regularly.
If we don't stop this Ag Amnesty this fall, you can be sure that we'll have an even more difficult time stopping a larger amnesty soon after
