More On Senate Immigration Deal

More On Senate Immigration Deal. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Today, Dan Fazio with Washington Farm Labor Association talks more about last weeks Senate immigration deal and how it will affect farmers.

FAZIO: Some bad news for employers; you’ll need to start using E-verify. You knew that was coming. That’s the system where before you can hire you have to put their information into a government computer and they tell you if the person is work authorized. Good news here for farmers is that is’s phased in and agriculture is last on the list to use e-verify and it’s about 5 years out from the time they sign the bill.

Fazio talks about the “future flow.”

FAZIO: The big news of course is about the “future flow” or guest worker visa that farmers are going to be using in out years to bring workers up here because we know Americans are not really interested in agriculture jobs. So the new visa program in the Senate bill is similar to the H2A program but it’s many. many times simpler.

And he says there is a bit more bad news.

FAZIO: There’re caps to the program. Right now the H2A program is uncapped and this new program is a three year visa that workers get and it covers all agricultural workers including full-time workers, dairy guys, etc. and even maybe some packing house workers so there’s going to be competition for these visas. The cap right now is set at 112,333 per year

But it is cumulative for the 3 years. More tomorrow.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.