WASHINGTON — With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers legally can be brought into the country.
The urgent effort, under way at the U.S. departments of Homeland Security, State and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vice between an impossibly complex process to hire legal guest-workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of undocumented planters, pickers and even middle managers crossing the border.
“It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. “As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a work force and that is a factor of what is going on today.”
The push to speedily rewrite the regulations is also the Bush administration’s attempt to step into the breach left when Congress failed to pass an immigration overhaul in June that could have addressed the reality of American farms, where almost three-quarters of the workers are thought to be illegal immigrants.
On all sides of the farm industry, the administration’s behind-the-scenes initiative to revamp H2A farmworker visas is fraught with anxiety. Immigrant advocates fear the changes will come at the expense of worker protections because the administration has received and reportedly is acting on extensive input from farm lobbyists. And farmers in areas such as California’s San Joaquin Valley, which is experiencing a 20 percent labor shortfall, worry the administration’s changes will not happen soon enough for the 2008 growing season.
“It’s like a ticking time bomb that’s going to go off,” said Luawanna Hallstrom, chief operating officer of Harry Singh &Sons, a third-generation family farm in Oceanside, Calif., that grows tomatoes. “I’m looking at my fellow farmers and saying, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?”’
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