August 25, 2011 - Wolcott - A group of Wayne County farmers gave Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a message last week in Wolcott: the federal government needs to give them consistent access to the foreign workers who labor on their farms.
“If we don’t soon get a fix for agricultural labor and our seasonal employees, nothing else is going to matter,” said Phil Wagner, owner of Wagner’s Apple Ridge Orchard, who hosted the gathering for the New York Apple Association.
Gillibrand, the first US Senator from New York to sit on the Senate Agriculture Committee in 40 years, visited Wolcott while on an all-day “listening tour” that took her across upstate New York. A press release said she planned to focus on federal policies and programs that could create rural jobs, but the 30-or-so people who gathered at Wagner’s farm, many of them fruit or dairy farm owners, had other ideas.
According to figures from Cornell University’s Cornell Farmworker Program, New York employs as many as 80,000 migrant, seasonal and year-round agricultural workers, many of them from Mexico and Central America. Mary Jo Dudley, the director of the program, said migrants make up the majority of the estimated 4,000 people who work in agriculture in Wayne County at the height of the fruit picking season. Up to an estimated 1,000 agricultural workers could labor on Cayuga County’s farms at the season’s peak, Dudley says, many of them migrants.
Wagner and the other farmers who spoke up at last week’s meeting said they’ve been unable to find local workers to harvest their crops even in this time of high employment. He said that without the five migrant workers who are currently working on his farm, he couldn’t get his apple crop in.
“My crop would fall to the ground, and I would probably file bankruptcy next summer,” he said.
Some farms employ as many as 60 migrant laborers during the harvest season, Wagner said. Though he and the other farmers who spoke to the Lakeshore News said those they’ve hired are legally able to work in the US, they were concerned that the US government might restrict their access to those workers. Nancy Wolf, whose family owns a local dairy farm, said the farm installed robotic milking machines out of fear that the labor needed to milk its cows might disappear.
“We need to focus on getting people here, and them being able to work,” Wolf said. Many at the meeting called for changes in the laws and regulations regarding migrant labor, and some pushed Gillibrand to work for passage of the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Securities Act, also known as the “AgJOBS” bill. Gillibrand and five other Democratic senators, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York introduced the bill as part of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2011.
The AgJOBS bill would create a program whereby many undocumented farm workers and agricultural guestworkers could gain temporary immigration status based on their past work experience. Workers who continued performing agricultural work would then have the chance of gaining permanent resident status. The AgJOBS bill would also revise the existing “H-2A” agricultural guestworker program, giving such workers more protections from employer exploitation. The revisions could render work in the US more attractive to such workers.
Variations of the AgJOBS bill have been introduced in Congress over the last 10 years or so, but died before they saw the light of passage. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act is currently in committee. Gillibrand said comprehensive immigration reform probably will not make it through Congress this year.
“It’s pure politics,” she said. “I cannot find one Republican senator who would do immigration reform.” Gillibrand pledged to push for immigration reforms that could address farmers’ labor needs, and called upon those present to join in the fight for the kinds of legislative changes that could alleviate their labor problems.
“What we have to do, as a community, is work harder on having our views be heard stronger and more directly and more aggressively,” she said. State Assemblyman Bob Oaks, R-Macedon, joined Gillibrand at last week’s meeting. As it ended, Oaks said everyone there would be “greatly appreciative” for any efforts she undertook “on behalf of immigration and the availability of labor.”
Some in Wolcott warned that without such efforts, farmers could turn away from fruit growing in the future and begin growing grains, which are less labor-intensive.
“It would be an awful shame to see this (land) go into corn and soybeans,” says John Sorbello, president of the Wayne County Farm Bureau.
That change would prove difficult for those who work the fields, as well. Jose Luis Garcia has come to Wagner’s farm from his home in Oaxaca, Mexico each harvesting season for the last three years. Garcia does not speak English, but Lakeshore News was able to interview him through an interpreter. When asked what has brought him all those miles year after year, he answered that work in the US allowed him to give his wife and two children “a better life.” Then he turned, and began picking apples again. ###
