For President Trump, one of the first positive things he can do is to get away from wall building rhetoric, and instead focus on building a bridge to our Hispanic communities. One way is to revisit our guest worker program—clearly, the H2A visa program is not working. The US needs a more flexible program that allows legal immigrants to work on farms year-round, changing the renewal process to allow workers and companies to have more consistency.
The current H2A program has serious issues. A new investigation has found that the Department of Labor rarely removes employers out of the program, leaving thousands of workers each year exposed to mistreatment, injury, and even death. The report also states that employers have stolen guest workers’ pay, forced them to live in overcrowded or dangerous housing, held them at gunpoint, or even been sent to prison for immigration fraud. Despite all this, companies have been allowed to continue receiving hundreds or even thousands of H-2 visas.
For the agriculture community, it is critical that we have a permanent guest worker program so farms of all sizes can find and maintain labor, not just season by season, but well into the future. To be more efficient, these visas should be for three to five years, so workers will not have to continually go back and forth, running the same corrupt gauntlet to get back into the US.
This is not a new concept, President GW Bush in 2004 suggested creating a guest-worker program that would “offer legal status, as temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States . . . .”
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