Farms in need welcome foreign workers
ALTO PASS, Ill. — Wayne Sirles parks his dusty pickup among rows of peach trees, where Mexican pickers pluck fruit that a few years ago would have dropped to the ground to rot for lack of hands to harvest it.
Not this year. Sirles, whose great-great-grandfather founded Rendleman Orchards in the tiny town of Alto Pass in southern Illinois, has for the second season hired temporary foreign workers through the government's H-2A visa program, stanching a loss of crops that threatened the viability of his family's 144-year-old farm.
He didn't want to. Determined to avoid the costs of the program, Sirles put up flyers in high schools, grocery stores and restaurants looking for local summertime help to pick peaches and apples.
But nothing came of the effort, he said. The family tried to work with the labor they had, but production got unsustainably low.
“We went for three or four years resisting the H-2A program because we thought we could do it, but we could not,” said Betty Sirles, Wayne's mother. Now Rendleman's team of 30 pickers includes 12 foreign workers on temporary visas who toil in the muggy midsummer heat alongside longtime employees but return to Mexico at the end of the four-month harvest.
As the nation's immigration debate roils, farms like Rendleman are far beyond the question of whether immigrant labor is needed. They say that they can't survive without it, their towns are better for it and reforms are necessary to maintain and replenish the manpower they need to pull in each season's harvest.
Revamping the H-2A visa program, which invites agricultural workers to work temporarily in seasonal jobs, is a priority for an industry that relies overwhelmingly on foreign-born workers to tend the fruits, vegetables and livestock that end up on American dinner tables.Three-quarters of the hired laborers who do most of the work on U.S. farms were born abroad, according to a recent paper published by the Migration Policy Institute. Nearly half don't have legal authorization to work in the U.S.The dependence on H-2A visas has grown as traditional farm labor pools shrink. Migrant workers who used to pass through the Midwest at harvest time have settled down to give their families more stability, and the number of Mexicans who used to flow across the border in search of work has been dwindling since the recession reduced demand and border security tightened. Meanwhile, immigrant farm workers already in the country are getting old, and their kids are seeking different lines of work, just as U.S. farm families have seen their own children do for decades.The Department of Labor certified nearly 166,000 H-2A visas last year, more than double the number five years earlier. Unlike the nonagricultural H-1B and H-2B guest worker programs, there is no cap on the number of visas issued.Illinois-based employers were certified for 809 of the H-2A visas in 2015, up 40 percent from 2010. So far this fiscal year, which started 11 months ago, 1,778 H-2A visas have been certified in Illinois. Most of the Illinois visas went to labor-intensive fruit and vegetable farms; corn and soybean farms rely more on automation.The program isn't cheap. H-2A workers must be paid a government-set wage that is high enough that it won't adversely affect U.S. workers. In Illinois, this year's rate is $13.01 an hour, significantly higher than the state's $8.25 minimum wage.Sarah Frey, co-owner of Frey Farms in Keenes, Ill., the state's largest H-2A employer, said she hires about 250 H-2A workers for the five-week pumpkin harvest in southern Illinois and Indiana.Including the housing and round-trip transportation employers are required to provide, each worker ends up costing about $16 an hour, she said.
