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Citizenship path: Letter to the Editor in Houston Chronicle

Citizenship path

Regarding "Do something!" (A modest fix before immigration reform), the editorial correctly admits that comprehensive immigration reform is the only way to truly solve the labor problems that we face in agriculture, but it fails to sufficiently address the underlying flaws with any guestworker program, including the one you applaud in Canada.

Canada's seasonal agricultural workers program, which has its share of labor abuses, may provide a higher quality of life for its farmworkers than current systems in place in our country, but any program that lacks a fair path to citizenship will continue to disadvantage both growers and farmworkers.

Growers will inevitably continue to experience labor shortages, while farmworkers will still be left without full protections of their rights.

U.S. workers suffer, too, as these programs incentivize employers to hire vulnerable and easily exploited guestworkers at below-market wage rates, rather than Americans and other legal workers willing to do the jobs. As the editorial suggests, for a system to be viable, all parties involved must find the program workable. This is exactly what the Senate has produced – a tough compromise between growers and workers that acknowledges that the measures included would benefit both parties as well as consumers. That is the reform we all should be advocating.

The U.S. House of Representatives needs to act now.

EPA Failure to Address Discrimination of California Latino Schoolchildren: Lawsuit Filed to Remedy EPA’s Civil Rights Program

OXNARD, Calif. – More than a decade after Latino parents filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) detailing the dangerous levels of pesticides at Latino public schools throughout California, they continue to experience racial discrimination. In August of 2011 EPA found that California Latino schoolchildren suffer disproportionately from exposure to pesticides and due to spraying near their schools, the EPA has yet to remedy this discrimination.

To try and finally force the EPA to protect civil rights, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment (CRPE), California Rural Legal Assistance Inc., Farmworker Justice and The City Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of the original plaintiffs, the Garcia family, and multiple generations of Latino schoolchildren who still do not have substantive protection from the EPA.

In 1999, the Garcia family alleged that their children and other Latino children were being exposed to dangerous levels of pesticides at their public schools, which are directly adjacent to several strawberry fields where methyl bromide and other fumigants are sprayed. In 2011, the EPA issued the first ever preliminary findings of racial discrimination based on Garcia’s claims. The EPA then entered into secret negotiations without the Garcias and issued a settlement that does not remedy the discrimination they suffered. EPA failed and continues to fail to protect the Garcias’ rights to freedom from racial discrimination.

“I will keep fighting for my family,” said Maria Garcia, a mother and grandmother, as the lawsuit was filed. This discrimination has gone on so long that Maria’s son who participated in the original suit as a high school student is now a father with two children who will attend the same polluted schools he did. These schools like many other schools in California with high concentrations of Latino students continue to face dangerous levels of pesticide exposure.

Fifty years ago this week marks the March on Washington that helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act which intended to protect families like the Garcias. At that march, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. shared his dream for a better country where all children could enjoy the full benefits America has to offer. The struggle to realize that promise today continues as the EPA has failed time and again to comply with its own civil rights guidelines.

Remarkably, the Garcias continue to dream for justice for their children and Latino children throughout California. Their complaint challenges the EPA’s own Civil Rights Act regulations and if successful the lawsuit has the potential to allow other people of color across the country more access to protections from racial discrimination. And it will formally recognize that a healthy environment is not a luxury but a civil right.

Farmworker Justice President Bruce Goldstein’s MAFO Lifetime Achievement Award Recognized by D.C. Bar Association

Bruce Goldstein, president of Farmworker Justice, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from MAFO, A National Partnership of Farmworker and Rural Organizations, this February. MAFO highlighted Mr. Goldstein’s work in litigation and advocacy on immigration issues and labor law, particularly the H-2A program, as key successes in his time at Farmworker Justice.

His achievement is recognized by the D.C. Bar Association in their August 2013 edition of the Washington Lawyer magazine. Mr. Goldstein’s award is listed alongside the recent accomplishments of former D.C. Bar president Myles V. Lynk and many other prominent D.C. lawyers.

Farmworker Justice OpEd: Rep. Gibson (NY) Has A Choice

As the debate over immigration policy takes center stage and lawmakers in the Senate pursue the hard work of compromise, Rep.Chris Gibson, R-Kinderhook, has a choice. He can support immigration policy that improves conditions for farmworkers, agricultural employers and consumers, or he can aggravate existing problems in the agricultural labor market and displace thousands of farmworkers, many of them U.S. citizens.

The Senate's approach to comprehensive immigration reform includes a bipartisan, labor-management compromise on agriculture. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., last month rejected that compromise. Instead, it approved Goodlatte's "Agricultural Guestworker Act," which would expand employer access to exploitable and cheap guestworkers. Doing so would pave the way for employers to hire foreign guestworkers over U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, while making life even harder for those currently harvesting crops across the country. The bill is both anti-U.S. worker and anti-immigrant; it needs to be stopped.

While undocumented immigrants compose more than half of the farm labor force nationally, there are still hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents working on farms in New York and the nation. The provisions in this flawed bill would give incentives to employers to displace these U.S. workers by providing access to cheap, exploitable guestworkers. It's bad for U.S. workers and for the guestworkers left to do the work.

New York's farms, which generate almost $4.4 billion annually in value from dairies, fruit orchards and other agricultural products, are important contributors in the state's economy.

Gibson surely is aware that for decades some New York growers of apples and other crops have used — and sometimes abused — Jamaican, Mexican and other foreign workers under the H-2A agricultural guestworker program.

It's time to modernize agricultural labor by granting undocumented farmworkers already hard at work a road map to a true immigration status and citizenship. The Goodlatte Agricultural Guestworker Act does just the opposite by marginalizing farmworkers. Undocumented workers already working in the fields would essentially be required to self-deport with only the hope of obtaining a new job offer and guestworker visa. The bill would cause farmworkers with spouses and children living here in the U.S. to suffer separation and hardship.

The Goodlatte program would allow employers to bring in 500,000 new agricultural guestworkers per year in addition to those undocumented workers who return home and are brought back on guestworker visas. Neither the current undocumented farmworkers nor the future farmworkers would have the opportunity to earn immigration status and the freedoms of citizenship.

There is a compelling alternative to this one-sided bill. The Senate's immigration reform bill includes a compromise for agriculture that has broad support and resulted from months of difficult negotiations between major agribusiness groups, organizations like mine that assist farmworkers and a bipartisan group of senators.

That's a more humane and sensible approach. Gibson should push for it.

Goodlatte claims his bill would put "farmers in the driver's seat," but instead it's essentially throwing the men and women who are working on farms and ranches today under the bus. The farmworkers putting food on our tables deserve better. Instead of pushing them farther into the margins of society, it's time we acknowledge their value and honor their difficult work.

Advocates Challenge EPA’s Continuing Failure to Protect Children and Families From Hazardous Pesticide Drift

On July 24th, a coalition of farmworker, public health, and conservation advocates filed a challenge in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect children from unsafe exposures to toxic pesticides. The suit seeks an answer to a petition that the advocates filed with the agency in … Read more Advocates Challenge EPA’s Continuing Failure to Protect Children and Families From Hazardous Pesticide Drift

New Farmworker Justice Report Profiles Dangers of Pesticide Poisoning & Offers Recommendations for EPA Action

Our new report exposes the serious health risks faced by thousands of farmworkers each year from pesticide exposure, and the failings of workplace regulations and standards to prevent the high rate of pesticide-related injuries, illnesses and deaths.

Exposed and Ignored: How Pesticides are Endangering Our Nation’s Farmworkers provides an overview of the harm caused to farmworkers across the country by pesticide exposure, including personal stories of workers and their families who have suffered serious illnesses. Despite the preventable nature of pesticide exposure, few farmworkers are properly notified of the risks they face on a daily basis and regulations aimed at protecting workers against pesticide exposure have not been updated in more than 20 years.

“Each year pesticide exposure poisons as many as 20,000 farmworkers, yet regulations to protect these vital workers have not been updated to address this growing problem,” said Virginia Ruiz, Director of Occupational and Environmental Health for Farmworker Justice. “These injuries, illnesses, and deaths are preventable by taking the necessary steps to protect our farmworkers and their families.”

Pesticide exposure causes farmworkers to suffer more chemical-related injuries and illnesses than any other workforce nationwide. Short term effects include stinging eyes, rashes, blisters, blindness, nausea, dizziness, headache, coma and even death. Long term impacts such as infertility, neurological disorders and cancer are also prevalent. Not only are farmworkers subjected to these risks, but their families who live in nearby communities and go to schools neighboring the fields face the same dangers.

The report offers recommendations to improve the safety of American farmworkers and their families, including:

-Updated Worker Protection Standards that require more frequent and thorough pesticide safety training, medical monitoring of workers exposed to risky pesticides, and improved safety precautions to limit contact with pesticides, particularly for pesticide handlers.
-Spanish translations of pesticide labels.
-Creation of buffer zones around schools and residential areas to protect farmworker families who are exposed through aerial drift.
-A national reporting system of pesticide use and poisonings and increased funding to research the health effects of repeated pesticide exposure.

“Just as we establish standards and regulations to protect workers in every industry, we must address the health and safety of the farmworkers who labor each day to put food on our tables,” said Ruiz. “Current workplace regulations are failing to keep American farmworkers safe.”

Hi-Res report version available here

Richmond Times-Dispatch Op-Ed by Bruce Goldstein: Goodlatte Bill moves agriculture in wrong direction

In the Richmond Times-Dispatch Saturday, there are two op-eds regarding agricultural worker immigration policy and the Agricultural Guestworker Act, authored by Rep. Goodlatte (R-VA), and passed by the House Judiciary Committee. In the first op-ed, Farmworker Justice President Bruce Goldstein criticizes that bill’s approach and calls for a path to citizenship for undocumented farmworkers and reasonable protections under guestworker programs. Rep. Goodlatte's bill is the worst of all worlds in that it is anti-U.S. worker, anti-immigrant, and anti-worker. The second op-ed is by Rep. Goodlatte, defending his bill (link included below).

Goldstein: Bill moves agriculture in wrong direction

As the debate over our nation’s immigration policy takes center stage and lawmakers in the Senate pursue the hard work of compromise, Virginia’s 6th District Congressman Bob Goodlatte is leading a very different charge in the House of Representatives that would aggravate existing problems in the agricultural labor market and displace thousands of farmworkers, many of them U.S. citizens.

Goodlatte is aggressively pushing forward the Agricultural Guestworker Act, which would expand employer access to exploitable and cheap guest workers. Doing so would pave the way for employers to hire foreign guest workers over U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, while making life even harder for the men and women harvesting crops across the country. The bill is anti-U.S. worker and anti-immigrant and it needs to be stopped. It passed out of a committee he chairs in Congress last week.

While undocumented immigrants compose more than half of the farm labor force, there are still hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents working on farms in Virginia and across the country. The provisions in this flawed bill would incentivize employers to displace those U.S. workers by providing access to cheap, exploitable guest workers. That’s bad for U.S. workers and for the guest workers left to do the work.

Agriculture is Virginia’s largest industry, employing almost 60,000 farmers and farmworkers and generating approximately $2.9 billion in output annually — so Goodlatte’s interest is no surprise. He’s well aware that for decades some of Virginia’s tobacco, apple and other farmers have used — and sometimes abused — the existing H-2A agricultural guest worker program. Farmers in Virginia make use of roughly 3,500 agricultural guest workers, placing Virginia among the top 10 states using the program.

Instead of creating armies of “guests” to do our work, it’s time to modernize agricultural labor by granting undocumented farmworkers already hard at work a road map to a true immigration status and citizenship. Goodlatte’s bill does just the opposite by marginalizing farmworkers. The undocumented workers already working in the fields would essentially be required to self-deport with only the hope of obtaining a new job offer and guest worker visa to return. Goodlatte’s bill would cause farmworkers with spouses and children living here in the U.S. to suffer separation and hardship. It also would disrupt our food system.

The new program would allow employers to bring in 500,000 agricultural guest workers per year in addition to those undocumented workers who return home and are brought back on guest worker visas. Neither the current undocumented farmworkers nor the future farmworkers would have the opportunity to earn immigration status and the freedoms of citizenship.

The new program would strip U.S. workers and future guest workers of most of the labor protections they have in the current H-2A program. Guest workers attempting to challenge a violation of wage requirements or other working conditions would not have meaningful access to attorneys or the courts. Meanwhile, participating growers could offer U.S. workers and foreign guest workers wage rates and other job terms even lower than those required in the program today.

There is a compelling alternative to this one-sided bill making its way through the House of Representatives. The Senate’s immigration reform bill includes a carefully balanced compromise for agriculture that has broad support and resulted from months of difficult negotiations between major agribusiness groups, organizations like mine that assist farmworkers and a bipartisan group of senators.

The Senate bill would stabilize the farm labor workforce and ensure a secure food supply by granting experienced undocumented farmworkers and their family members who meet eligibility requirements an opportunity to keep working, obtain legal immigration status and earn lawful permanent residency. It would also give farmers access to future guest workers through a new program that substantially reduces employers’ costs while protecting U.S. workers from job loss and wage depression and preventing abuse of guest workers.

That’s a more humane and more sensible approach than Goodlatte’s bill.

He claims his new bill would put “farmers in the driver’s seat,” but he’s essentially throwing the men and women who are working on those farms today under the bus. The farmworkers putting food on our tables deserve better than Goodlatte’s one-sided bill. Instead of pushing farmworkers farther into the margins of society, it’s time we acknowledge their value and honor their difficult work.

Link to Rep. Goodlatte's Op-Ed:

Goodlatte: House bill provides easy access to legal agricultural workforce

Senate Immigration Compromise: A Step Forward for Farmworkers

Farmworker Justice Statement Following Senate Passage of Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act

“We’re one step closer to fixing our broken immigration policy and modernizing agricultural labor relations,” the president of Farmworker Justice said today after the Senate approved the compromise immigration reform bill by a vote of 68-32.

“This carefully negotiated bill won broad support in part because it includes tough compromises made by agricultural workers and employers. While the agricultural worker programs are not perfect, they will help improve the lives and working conditions of the men and women working to put food on our tables and will help ensure a productive agricultural sector,” said Bruce Goldstein.

“If enacted, this bill would help stabilize the farm labor workforce and grant eligible undocumented farmworkers the opportunity to earn legal immigration status by proving their recent agricultural work in the United States and continuing to work in agriculture. It would help families remain together and build better lives for farmworker families while affording growers access to skilled and reliable workers.

“The agricultural worker compromise included in the bill has the broad support of major agribusiness groups, farmworker advocates, and now the U.S. Senate. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives should follow the Senate’s lead and take up this bill without delay.”

Final Vote Today on S.744 & Update on Chambliss’ Amendments

Today at 4pm ET, the Senate will conclude debate and cast the final vote on its comprehensive immigration reform bill, S. 744. There will be a series of procedural votes beforehand. Majority Leader Reid requested that Senators cast their votes from their desk, an unusual requirement marking the importance of this vote

Update on Sen. Chambliss’s Amendments
Sen. Saxby Chambliss introduced anti-farmworker amendments. In an effort to obtain additional Republican supporters, the bill’s cosponsors discussed potential compromises with Sen. Chambliss. Fortunately, his amendments were not included in the final bill. Farmworker Justice worked with the UFW and others to help prevent Sen. Chambliss’s harmful amendments from moving forward. No compromise regarding those amendments was reached. Thank you to those of you who weighed in with your Senators to oppose Sen. Chambliss’s amendments.

Last night,Sen. Chambliss spoke on the Senate floor about the agricultural compromise and his amendments to it. He said he wanted to bring his concerns to the attention of his colleagues in the Senate and his friends in the House of Representatives. Specifically, Sen. Chambliss highlighted his interest in making it more difficult for farmworkers to enter the blue card program and to earn lawful permanent residency. He noted that with legal status, the farmworkers with blue cards could “work in any job in the United States” and may work in another industry “where the working conditions are better and maybe even the pay is better.” He also spoke about his amendments to the new future worker program in S.744, including his interest in limiting the liability of agricultural employers, which he proposed to do by gutting worker access to legal services, and limiting access to the courts through binding alternative dispute resolution. Despite Sen. Chambliss’s unjustified complaints about frivolous litigation, the reality is that guestworkers are vulnerable to abuse and need access to legal services and the judicial system to deter and remedy violations of their limited rights. Even with this access, most guestworkers are reluctant to come forward to complain about workplace violations. The temporary agricultural worker program in S.744 includes coverage under the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, portability of the visa under the W-4 program (so some workers can switch employers), legal services representation, and access to the judicial system, and is included in the new international labor recruitment protections in the bill. These provisions are much-needed, integral components of the compromise that the UFW prioritized. The Congressional record of Sen. Chambliss’s speech is available here.

Stay tuned for more updates about the immigration debate as we turn to challenges ahead in the House of Representatives.

Immigration Reform Update & Final Vote Alert

The final vote on the Senate comprehensive immigration reform bill, S. 744, may be as early as tomorrow morning. Now is the time to call your Senators and tell them to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Please call TODAY. You can call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for your Senators or find Senators’ direct lines at www.senate.gov.

The message is simple:
Please vote to support S. 774. Farmworkers urgently need immigration reform. The bipartisan negotiated compromise between farmworkers and agricultural employers is included in S. 744 and we ask you to vote YES on S. 744.

Update:

On Monday, the Senate passed an important procedural vote on Leahy amendment 1183, a substitute bill to the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, S. 744. The vote was 67 to 27 in favor of ending debate and voting on a substitute version of the bill, and is viewed as an indicator of the S.744’s overall support. All of the Democrats present and 14 Republicans voted in favor of the measure, plus an additional two Democrats who support the bill were still traveling and unable to vote. You can see the list of yeas and neas here.

The substitute bill includes the most recent version of S. 744 and provisions negotiated by the gang of eight and a group of Republican Senators led by Senators Corker (R-TN) and Hoeven (R-ND), aimed at gaining more Republican votes. Many of the added provisions have been sharply criticized, including significant increases to the border security provisions of the bill and language limiting access to social security contributions and earnings made from 2004 to 2014 by individuals legalizing under the broad legalization program and nonimmigrants who have overstayed their visas. However, S. 744 needs 60 votes to defeat a filibuster in order to pass the Senate, and before the agreement on the Corker-Hoeven amendment it was unclear whether sufficient Republicans would vote for the bill without the additional provisions.

The Senate will vote on Leahy amendment 1183 this morning and is expected to vote on final passage of the bill as early as tomorrow morning. With a few exceptions, most of the Senators voting in favor of ending debate on Monday have committed their support to S.744’s final passage (at least the version in Leahy 1183). There is an effort in the Senate to try to put together a package of Democratic and Republican amendments, which may be put up for a vote today, but it would require the unanimous consent of all Senators, making it very complex. At this point, it is not clear which amendments will be included, but Senator Chambliss has filed multiple harmful amendments to the agricultural compromise in S. 744. We will continue tracking developments on the amendments and will keep you updated. You can watch the debate on the Senate website.

The House

The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mark-up the “Legal Workforce Act,” H.R. 1772 today at 11:00am and the “Supplying Knowledge-based Immigrants and Lifting Levels of STEM Visas Act” (The SKILLS Visa Act), H.R. 2131, on Thursday at 10:00am. The Legal Workforce Act is an E-verify bill and the SKILLS Visa Act is a high-skilled worker visa program. Neither of these bills contain a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants and both represent the Committee’s commitment to a piecemeal approach to reform that fails to address the broken immigration system and the broad support for a roadmap to citizenship.