Articles Posted in Work Visas

According to the Dairy Herd Migrant or foreign labor is a must for the dairy industry and other parts of agriculture, and a reduction in the workforce could cost consumers considerably. Labor and immigration are tied together, and it includes both legal and illegal immigration, says David Anderson, AgriLife Extension economist in College Station, Texas.

The value of milk production is $28.7 billion and this part of the dairy industry alone provides 147,000 jobs nationwide. If the related industries are added in, it is a $55 billion industry with 363,000 jobs. If you had a foreign labor reduction of only 20 percent, you would lose 33,000 employees, $5.5 billion in sales and $1.5 billion in income, Anderson explains. Total elimination would be a lot higher, he adds. Illegal immigrants make up 50 percent of agriculture’s workers.

About 20 percent of the dairy owners said they see labor shortages and are increasing wages to attract workers. Wages are higher where competing jobs are located. There is a vacuum of available workers, in part caused by the failure to pass immigration reform and the movement of penalties from civil to criminal.

I am in the process of reviewing the proposed changes to the H2B Visa program. Upon initial review, there are good and bad news. Here is a brief summary of the Changes, stay tuned more to come.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has submitted to the Federal Register a Final Rule that will change the requirements affecting H-2B beneficiaries and their employers.

Key areas of changes covered in the Final Rule include:

We previously reported about the much needed changes to the H2A Visa Program announced last week. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced several reforms in the H-2A visa system, which allows farmers to hire foreigners for field work that Americans are unwilling to do.

Click here to download the Press release with the Changes Download file

According to the AZ Starnet, “For every farmworker, there are three to 3.5 jobs created in related industries such as chemicals, trucking, refrigeration, fertilizer, packaging . . . a lot of different operations,” Tom Nassif, president and CEO of Western Growers, said last year. He said his agricultural trade organization represents 3,000 members who grow roughly half the produce in the United States.

A December 11, 2008 USCIS Update announces that the agency has finalized changes to H-2A regulations. This final rule will facilitate the H-2A process for employers by removing certain limitations.

U.S. employers may file an H-2A petition with USCIS if they have a shortage of available U.S. workers to fill temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs. Once the petition is approved, the employers can hire foreign workers to fill those jobs for a limited period of time. There is no cap limitation on H2A visas unlike the sister program H2B.

Key areas of reform addressed in the final rule include:

According to the SF Chronicle with unemployment rising, foreign workers are less welcome, say immigration restrictionists, who have vowed to oppose offering legal status to the nation’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants.

Until a comprehensive bill is introduced in Congress, Obama’s pick to head the Department of Homeland Security, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, will play a key role in refocusing the way the government handles immigration.

Problems in the legal immigration system have festered for years. The agency granting permanent legal residence (the green card is the token) and citizenship has long been plagued by epic backlogs and dysfunctional computer networks. Major policy debates over appropriate levels of immigration and whether to prioritize family ties or economic contributions – and high- or low-skilled workers – remain unresolved after “comprehensive” immigration bills died in Congress in 2006 and 2007.

In November, the U.S. economy shed jobs at the fastest rate in 34 years – and experts say December could be even worse. The number of jobs lost in the current recession, which began in December 2007, surpasses the 1.6 million jobs lost in the 2001 recession.

As a result, job losses were spread across a wide variety of industries: manufacturing, leisure and hospitality, construction and even, in the midst of the holiday shopping season, retail. Also seeing sharp declines were professional and business services, a category seen by some economists as a proxy for overall economic activity, and financial services, at the heart of the current crisis.

In November the number of people with a higher degree who were out of work rose to 1.413 million from 1.411 million in the previous month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.