Immigration Reform

Immigration Reform. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The Senate has moved on from the farm bill it recently passed and is focusing on comprehensive immigration reform. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano held a press conference yesterday regarding the importance of this reform for agriculture.

VILSACK: Comprehensive immigration reform is extraordinarily important for this country to get done this year and it’s particularly important for rural America and for the farming community. The reality is we’ve got about 1.1 million people who are working agriculture today. Roughly 700-thousand of them are probably not documented properly and there have been shortages throughout the United States.

Vilsack says that this has created a loss of economic opportunity across the country.

VILSACK: So it’s important and necessary for us to have a workable system that brings those who have been working in agriculture out of the shadows to provide some stability in that workforce and then to compliment that with a workable guest worker system that allows us to keep track of the number of people in the country to ensure that we have an adequate workforce.

Sec. Napolitano said she thinks this is a good border security bill.

NAPOLITANO: It’s actually a great border security bill because it provides us with even more technology and the like to be force multipliers of the almost 20-thousand agents we have between the ports of entry and it also increases the number of officers we can put at the actual land ports of entry.

More tomorrow on this important bill.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.