Short on hands, farmers push new guest worker bill

HUGHSON, Calif. — For generations, Vito Chiesa’s family has grown peaches for canning, but the Central California farmer plans to bulldoze his entire orchard if he can’t get enough workers to hand-pick the fruit.

That’s the message Chiesa and other growers will take to Washington this week, as they fly in to campaign for a new Senate bill that would create a guest worker program to grant as many as 1.5 million farm laborers legal status to keep working in the United States.

A similar proposal was defeated last year after legislators stonewalled immigration reform. But farm lobbyists are betting the stand-alone bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho and set to be introduced Wednesday, will find new supporters in the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress.

Growers say aggressive security patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border have created a labor shortage that’s left apples hanging on trees in Washington state, marred berry harvests in Oregon and delayed the onion harvest in Texas. The American Farm Bureau Federation has warned labor shortages could cause $5 billion in losses to the agriculture industry.

The economic threat is particularly acute in the nation’s top agricultural state where more than one-third of the nation’s farm workers are employed, California farmers say. Last summer, a quarter of the pear crop in rural Lake County rotted on the field when pickers never showed up, said Toni Scully, a pear packer there.

The bill would create a pilot program allowing people who have worked in agriculture for at least 150 days a year for three years, or 100 days per year for five years, to apply for a green card. It would grant legal status to no more than 1.5 million workers over five years, some of whom could apply for citizenship.