The investor-backed bipartisan push in Congress to slash American farmworkers’ wages has hit a marshmallow wall of evasions, procrastination, and vague predictions, according to media reports.
“If you’re not talking about border security, even the things you’d be interested in doing, it’s hard to roll up your sleeves and work on that,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN), who sits on the Senate’s agriculture committee. “So I think that’s why it’s not gained much momentum,” he told Politico.
The top Republican in the Senate’s agriculture committee, Sen. John Boozman (R-AR), told Politico he has not “really heard a lot about it as far as being a priority from leadership.” Boozman is one of the GOP leaders.
“I don’t see it happening before the August recess,” said Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID), who is a co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate.
The legislators’ tactful evasions are allowing the House’s Farm Workforce Modernization Act to die while Republican politicians shrug their shoulders, point fingers, and deny influence over the massive bill that would smuggle wealth from their voters’ pocketbooks to their donors, including many who live on the coasts.
But the politicians’ evasions also help the D.C. lobbyists who need to explain why they failed to deliver the bill’s economic windfall to their clients.
The evasions have also been helped by the recent claim that the bill is tangled in a complicated legal dispute. National Public Radio (NPR) reported on July 18:
[The bill’s] biggest hurdle is the lawsuit provision. It proposes to expand employee protections known as the Migrant and Seasonal Agriculture Workers Protections Act.
That’s one of the many laws establishing labor protections for farmworkers under the Labor Department, and it regulates the contracting, payment, record keeping, housing, transportation and other working conditions of farmworkers in the U.S.
Proponents of the immigration bill argue many of these laws are already broader and wider reaching than MSPA requirements, or in many cases even the same. The biggest difference: the possibility of workers filing lawsuits against their employers.
The apparent failure of the bill is good news for the GOP’s rural senators because it will keep more local payroll money in their voters’ pocketbooks, in retailers’ cash registers, and in communities’ tax receipts.
The bill would have diverted much farmland payroll to coastal investors by encouraging the farm companies to hire very cheap visa workers instead of local Americans. The visa workers, dubbed H-2As, take most of their earnings back home — but would get also a pay cut under the bill.
The bill’s defeat will also pressure farm investors to spend more money on technology investment that allows local workers — legal or not — to get more work done each day. The technology includes robot cow-milkers as well as a new generation of robot field equipment, such as weed-killing robots and harvesters.
There is growing evidence that Congress’s refusal to provide more and cheaper migrant workers is pressuring the farm sector to automate stoop-labor jobs with expensive high-tech gear that creates good jobs in farm districts.
The bill’s demise also prevents a conflict with the many Republican voters who oppose the legislation’s effort to integrate illegal migrants into local U.S. economies.
But many establishment activists in Washington, DC, are backing the cheap labor and amnesty bill
The bill’s chief advocate is Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), an immigration lawyer who represents the interests of West Coast investors, such as FWD.us. The investors gain from both sides of the bill, which provides cheap labor to Republican-run farm districts in exchange for a huge flow of amnestied farmworkers to Democratic legislators.
The leading Republican supporter is Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA), an orchard owner who would gain cheap labor from the bill. Newhouse is trying to fend off a strong local challenge from Loren Culp.
Establishment media sites also push the bill as a cure for the inflation that is now hitting the Democrats’ urban voters and President Joe Biden’s poll numbers.
The NPR article pushed the claim with a headline saying, “The Senate is nearing a deal on immigration that could also lower food prices.”
The Politico article is headlined, “The clock ticks down on immigration deal that could help rein in food inflation: The Senate could shatter over a decade of stalemate. But they’re running out of time.”
The cut-wages-to-cut-inflation claim is being pushed by pro-migration groups, such as the American Immigration Council.
However, the bill would have little impact on inflation because labor costs are only about five percent of retail store food prices, and the farm labor force is less than one percent of the economy, noted Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
The farm bill “changed the regulations [for H-2A workers] with the explicit intent of reducing wages … [but] farm labor makes very little difference [to food prices] because the price of food is determined by mostly the cost of transportation, packaging, retail markup, pesticides, and the cost of land,” said Camarota.
“You can’t cut the price for consumers by lowering wages for the bottom end of the labor market,” he added.
Even if the bill fails, allies for Lofgren and Newhouse are helping their cheap-labor cause by inserting new rules into the 2023 appropriations budget. For example, the Democrat-run draft budget now directs the Department of Homeland Security to let low-wage H-2A seasonal visa workers work year-round in dairies and meatpacking plants:
SEC. 408. In fiscal year 2023, nonimmigrants shall be admitted to the United States under section 101(a)(l5)(H)(ii)(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(ii)(a)) to perform agricultural labor or services, without regard to whether such labor is, or services are, of a temporary or seasonal nature.
However, that provision may be stripped from the spending plan by the 50 Republican senators in the Senate. The task falls to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the top GOP member of the Senate’s homeland defense appropriations bill.
The Republican senators are aware that they all lost their jobs in the Senate majority in early 2021 when immigrant voters helped the Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia.
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