State’s Farms Cultivating Migrant Labor

By KATHERINE M. SKIBA

Washington – A partner in Wisconsin’s largest Christmas tree farm, John Ahl is watching the immigration debate closely. Most of the 125 employees of Northern Christmas Trees & Nursery near Black River Falls are temporary workers from Mexico.

Ahl, 54, who with his wife and her parents has a 6,600-acre operation, said he was hard-pressed to hire locals for jobs starting at about $10 an hour, tending trees, shrubs and nursery plants. Even those without many skills prefer air-conditioned office jobs to what Ahl called “stoop labor” in Merrillan.

“The dairy farmers, they all have migrants now,” he said, “and you can go right down the list: pickles, cranberries, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage, just about any agricultural product that has hand labor involved.”

With the Senate poised for key votes on immigration reform today, the state’s need for workers for grinding, dirt-under-the- fingernails jobs on its farms means lawmakers such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) are getting an earful.

Feingold said that last week in the state, he heard two views on migrant workers.

“I have heard from agricultural operations all over the state who feel very strongly they want provisions to allow these individuals to get legal status and work,” he said.

“And I’ve heard from other people in rural communities who believe this is taking jobs away.”

The long, complicated immigration reform bill up for consideration has a section called “AgJOBS,” which stands for the Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act.

It affects two areas. One would let current agricultural workers apply for temporary-worker visas and, if they meet certain criteria, permanent residency. The other irons out what observers have called serious wrinkles in an immigration program, the same one Ahl uses to find laborers, categorized as “temporary, non-immigrant” help.

The AgJOBS provisions originally were in a separate bill, which counted Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) among its co-sponsors.

Neither Kohl nor Feingold would say how he would vote on immigration reform, with several amendments still in play.

‘Overwhelming support’

But Kohl said AgJOBS has “overwhelming support.” Its backers include the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation.

Jeff Lyon, the bureau’s director of governmental relations, said the dairy industry in particular has become more reliant on migrant help. “It’s difficult to find people to do those jobs, and quite honestly, there’s other opportunities for people in communities across Wisconsin,” he said.

House Republican Tom Petri of Fond du Lac said he has heard much the same from large dairy operations. “For some reason, family members and other Americans don’t seem to be interested in milking cows three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said.

Petri described operations with three or four people who live in a bunkhouse, receive more than the minimum wage and send money back to Mexico. “My impression is that they all have government documents, but it isn’t always easy to tell if everything is authentic,” he said.

The University of Wisconsin Extension has even begun Spanish- language training that covers milking skills, calf management, reproduction and herdsmanship, after a survey found that 38% of dairy farmers had to hire translators to communicate with their help.

And the Working Group on Latino Immigrants in Rural Wisconsin held its first meeting Wednesday at the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. It was led by Enrique Figueroa, an official at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has a doctorate in agricultural economics.

“I’ve visited with a number of dairy farmers and potato farmers and bean farmers and nursery owners, and they universally say, ‘I just can’t find local labor,’ ” said Figueroa, who sits on the department board. “The local labor is either unavailable or unreliable.”

By his estimate, migrant workers in the state once numbered as many as 25,000 until the early 1980s and now range from 5,000 to 6,000.

Figueroa said the drop stemmed from a few factors: mechanization, a trend away from labor-intensive crops such as pickles, and a tendency for migrants to settle in one locale rather than follow the seasons and chase harvests from state to state.

State counts thousands

The state offers additional glimpses in a report on the migrant worker population, which shows 4,598 in the state last year: 1,696 agricultural workers, 2,511 food processing workers and 391 of their children.

But Dick Jones, spokesman for the state Department of Workforce Development, noted that those were seasonal workers only, in Wisconsin for up to 10 months a year. The numbers do not count year- round, full-time workers on dairy farms or in meat-packing plants, he said.

How many immigrants are undocumented is tough to say. National estimates say that up to 50% of agricultural production workers – the laborers behind the farm gates, not in processing plants – are undocumented, Figueroa said.

But Dan Whiting, communications director for Sen. Larry Craig (R- Idaho), an original sponsor of AgJOBS, said the figure might be as high as 80%.

Whiting said unions and employers supported AgJOBS, but not the far right or the far left.

KEY ELEMENTS

The Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act, part of the federal immigration bill, includes these provisions:

— Agricultural workers who worked at least 150 days in the two years that ended Dec. 31 may apply for a Z-A visa. That’s after paying a $100 fine and undergoing a background check.

The visas will be capped at 1.5 million cumulatively over five years. They will let people travel into and out of the United States.

— To hold these visas, workers must continue to work in agriculture in the U.S. for future periods: 150 days yearly for three years or 100 days yearly for five years.

— When the backlog for green cards, or permanent residency status, is cleared in about eight years, Z-A visa holders may apply for one. That’s after paying a $400 fine, showing they are current on taxes and learning English. The card puts them on a path to citizenship.

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