Late Monday evening, my representative in Congress, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), gave his committee members a 49-page bill that would massively overhaul — and expand — the agricultural guest worker program. The bill, which would create one million temporary work visas, would replace the current H-2A program for temporary work visas and drastically increase the range of industries open to these “temporary” workers.
No longer would the work need to be seasonal — Goodlatte sells the program as a means for “year-round agricultural employers to participate when adequate domestic labor cannot be found.”
What Goodlatte means, though, is that employers would be allowed to participate when they would rather import cheap, foreign labor than raise wages, improve working conditions, and invest in mechanization.
While these workers are ostensibly temporary, in an editorial authored by Goodlatte promoting his bill, he explained, “Since not all agriculture jobs require the same level of skill and experience, the bill gives employers the opportunity to invest their time training workers for specialized or hard to fill jobs by allowing workers to stay for a longer period of time and provides flexible touchback requirements.”
In other words, these are temporary workers in name only. Goodlatte wants to see American employers invest in training foreign workers for higher skill jobs, employing them seemingly indefinitely. There seems to be no end to the Republican Establishment’s willingness to sell out American workers — and belittle the American work ethic. It seems Goodlatte has decided there are simply no jobs in agriculture— skilled or unskilled — that Americans would ever be willing to take.
As more companies raise their starting pay — Target recently announced it will pay all employees at least $11 an hour, beginning this month — every American industry has to adjust. In order to compete with $11 an hour for standing at a cash register in an air-conditioned building, employers with less comfortable work environments will have to make changes, whether that means increased pay or substituting mechanization for hard labor. That’s how the market works.
Unless, if Bob Goodlatte gets his way, you’re Big Agriculture. As Goodlatte sees it, agriculture shouldn’t have to adjust to the market. Goodlatte doesn’t want American farms to move into the 21st century.
The pressure the market is already placing on agriculture is pushing farms to raise wages and modernize, substituting their foreign labor with American workers and modern machinery.
It’s been less than a year since American voters chose a president who vowed to cut down on immigration to boost wages. So far, it seems to be working. Why is Representative Goodlatte trying to undermine that progress? The employees at the poultry plants and apple orchards in his district should demand answers.