Business

LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: Farmers need stable labor force

By Bill Moss, Published: August 20, 2012

If Congress would do its job and adopt comprehensive immigration reform, farmers would be more optimistic about the future of their livelihood and ability to feed the nation.Instead, Congress dawdles and politicizes the issue. State legislatures, notably those in Georgia, Alabama and Arizona, have made their states enemy ground for seasonal farmworkers. Harsh measures could happen next in North Carolina, which could mean that apple growers have no help to pick the crop and large nurseries lose the labor they need to grow landscape plants. The lack of action is a threat to Henderson County's $371 million farming, packing and shipping industry.
The labor force threat has come into focus in recent weeks as farmers have talked about their business. At a forum on immigration in Mills River, Van Wingerden nurseries manager Bert Lemkes and Edneyville apple grower Kenny Barnwell expressed frustration with the government's foot-dragging. At a roundtable hosted by Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, a campaign surrogate for Mitt Romney, farmers raised the labor issue as a top concerns.
"Who's going to pick our crops?" a tomato farmer asked. "Who's going to put stakes in the ground. I could pay somebody $25 an hour to pick tomatoes and they wouldn't make it till noon."
The mythology of talk radio bloviators and anti-immigration zealots is that undocumented migrants from Latin America take jobs from American citizens. Trouble is, farmers are unable to find workers that know the work and are willing to do it. Farmers fear that the federal program that screens workers, called E-verify, will eliminate the experienced and reliable labor force they count on to bring in the harvest.
"We have found out that e-verify confirms the real problem with our current outdated and failed immigration policy," Lemkes said at the Mills River church program. "When asked how E-verify works for you, my answer is those that are willing to do the work fail the system, but many of those that pass the system fail to do the work."
Lemkes articulates a powerful response to the simplistic and often ignorant portrayal of immigration as a threat to the economy. Instead, measures that chase a skilled work force from the farm threaten the nation's ability to supply the dinner table.
"The jobs of American employees, which includes growers, supervisors, merchandisers and managers, are at stake when we cannot find the labor we need," Lemkes said. "Around 70 percent of the labor force in Hendersonville is estimated to be undocumented. These are honest, hardworking and loyal folks who have come here only seeking work and better pay."
Farmers are no more for amnesty than their conservative brethren. But if Congress won't act, they are asking for an agriculture work visa program that will keep workers in the fields and orchards. It may be a Plan B, a cobbled together option. But it may be the only option that can pass and save farming until Congress develops the backbone to act in the best interest of farming and anyone who eats food.