During his final days in office, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey stacked unsightly shipping containers along the U.S.-Mexico border at a cost of $82 million.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, up to his usual Scroogian border tricks, continued to herd asylum-seekers onto buses bound for so-called “sanctuary cities,” while dispatching National Guard troops to string concertina wire along the banks of the Rio Grande.
It’s another of his tough-guy ploys to thwart what he calls an “invasion.” Never mind that these invaders are desperate men, women and children fleeing danger and despair in places like Nicaragua and Cuba. Their desperation, after weekslong dangerous treks, has led them to El Paso, Brownsville and other border communities, where they bed down at night under thin blankets on downtown sidewalks. Such are the invaders.
Every nation has the right, indeed the obligation, to monitor and protect its borders. Our own vision of the border has evolved significantly over time, truly hardening only after the 1980s. The challenges today are in part the product of U.S. policy, both domestic and foreign. And just as we feel we have an obligation to protect the border as it stands today, we also have a moral and legal obligation to allow people to seek asylum.
For decades, Congress has considered comprehensive immigration and border reform, only to be thwarted by Tea Party Republicans in 2013 and, more recently, nativists in the tradition of Stephen Miller, former President Donald Trump’s dead-eyed anti-immigration zealot. The result is the chaos and misery we see today.
As the lame-duck session of the 117th Congress hobbles to a holiday conclusion, legislation known as the Affordable and Secure Food Act represents a modest effort to chip away at the chaos. Sponsored by U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., the bill would modify America’s primary guest worker program, commonly called H-2A, by providing visas for year-round jobs rather than only seasonal ones, while establishing a program for farmworkers and their families to earn a path to permanent residency after 10 years of work. The bill also would establish a mandatory electronic employment verification system for agricultural work nationwide.
Border reform strategy, at least since the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act), has been to take the comprehensive approach, something of a Cirque du Soleil balancing act that required passage of the total package to avoid total collapse. Alas, thinking in totality hasn’t worked, and with the House of Representatives coming under control once again of a party for the most part uninterested in effective, humane border and immigration reform, it’s time to think individual components, not the whole inter-dependent contraption. Bipartisan legislation to protect the Dreamers, proposed by U.S. Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., is one example, while Bennet’s bill is another.
The Colorado Democrat, representing a state with major agricultural interests, recognizes that the majority of undocumented immigrants head north for one reason: employment. American agriculture, facing a serious labor shortage, is in dire need of their skills and their willingness to do the low-paid, arduous work that most Americans spurn. U.S. farms hire more than 2 million workers each year, at least half of them probably in the country illegally. When we can’t get them, food prices rise.
“Today, America’s farmers and ranchers are short more than 100,000 workers — all across this country — to plant seeds, to pick berries, to raise cattle and do the hard, essential work of feeding this country,” Bennet said in a speech on the Senate floor last month. “It’s why growers all across America are banging down the doors of this Capitol, pleading with us, to fix the broken H-2A system for farmworkers.”
Bennet’s legislation would freeze the minimum wage for U.S. or foreign agricultural workers for 2023 and then cap wage increases for 10 years at three percent. The number of year-round visas would not exceed 26,000 for the first three years and then for the next six years would only increase annually by up to 15 percent. Responding to the insistence of American labor groups over the years, the bill would also help farmworkers secure affordable housing.
The bill incorporates several measures that Canada uses in its much more successful guest worker program. Our system, using the term loosely, is clunky and almost unworkable, not to mention vulnerable to abuse. Our neighbors to the north, in contrast, work with their Mexican, Central American and Caribbean counterparts to keep the system running smoothly. They arrange visas, coordinate round-trip travel arrangements, enforce health and safety standards and make sure that workers get paid.
Until recently, a more ambitious version of the Bennet bill had a Republican co-sponsor, U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho. He dropped off after failing to resolve border security concerns in the legislation, and Bennet scaled down the bill. The revised version still enjoys a measure of Republican support, as well as the support of growers, business groups, immigration advocates and labor groups, including the United Farm Workers, the union founded by the legendary Cesar Chavez.
Bennet’s bill, if it passes, will do nothing at the moment to dissipate the crowds of would-be asylum seekers gathered on the banks of the Rio Grande. It’s a promising effort, nonetheless, to help clear away the troublesome weeds of border and immigration policy chaos we’ve allowed to take root. It’s also a reminder of what Govs. Abbott and Ducey could be doing if, like those agricultural workers on whom we rely, they were responsible stewards. Instead of lining the border with shipping containers and concertina wire, they could be preparing the soil and planting the seeds of reform. If they were serious about solving the border crisis, their efforts could result in a harvest of fairness, order, security and goodwill between cross-border neighbors. With this bill, a Colorado senator shows what it means to be serious.
>> Houston Chronicle
