True Left

Farmers push for immigration reform to counter labor shortages and rising food prices

Farmers across the U.S. are joining a push for national immigration reform that they say could ease labor shortages and lower food prices as surging production costs continue to rock the agriculture industry.

The farm operators say the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, already passed by the House and pending in the Senate, will provide them with a stable reliable workforce by creating a path to citizenship for undocumented agricultural workers and reforming the seasonal farmworker visa program, among other things.
...
Stephanie Mickelsen owns a large-scale potato farming operation in Idaho and said her farm began using the H-2A program for farmworkers, which has “made a huge difference” but because the visa only allows temporary authorization for nine months at a time, finding labor continues to be a problem.

“We have about 60 full-time people that work on the farm all year long, but that is not enough when you hit harvest to be able to get that crop out of the ground, so we need an additional 100 to 150 employees on the farm side, that’s not including the processing and packing facilities,”
...
As the country experiences the highest 12-month increase in food prices since May 1979, according to the consumer price index, farmers say this is in part because of labor problems.

A 2022 Texas A&M University study commissioned by the American Business Coalition, a bipartisan group of 1,200 business leaders who advocate for immigration reform, found that having more migrant and H-2A workers were related to lower inflation, higher average wages and lower unemployment. The study also found that “more denied petitions for naturalizations are associated with larger consumer prices and higher inflation.”
...
“It is very important to really pass something because labor shortages in agriculture are getting worse every year,” he said. “It’s very hard to know what exactly is going to happen but at least in terms of the number of workers you have every year it would eliminate some of the most pressing issues like the fact that workers can stay here all year-round so that’s kind of helpful.”