Worker program changes draw fire

Guest-laborer rules defended by official

WASHINGTON &#8212; The Bush administration Wednesday proposed streamlining an agricultural guest-worker program, but growers and farmworker advocates alike already doubt the changes will do much good.

With Congress stalled on broader immigration reform, the administration wants to ease certain wage, housing and other requirements in the existing guest-worker program. The revisions are supposed to make it easier to bring in the foreign workers U.S. farmers say they need.

&quot;The changes will go a long way towards ensuring that America's farmers will have a stable, legal work force they can count on at harvest time,&quot; Deputy Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner said Wednesday.

The H-2A program allows farmers to import foreign workers if domestic workers aren't available. It is criticized often but used relatively rarely. Last year, about 75,000 foreign farmworkers entered the United States through the H-2A program. This was only a fraction of the 1.2 million farmworkers laboring in the United States last summer.

&quot;It's nothing compared to our labor need,&quot; said Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League. &quot;It's not even a thimbleful.&quot;

Cunha said Wednesday that he didn't know any grower in his region who uses the current H-2A program. Only about 3,000 H-2A workers came to California last year, amounting to less than 1 percent of the state's total farmworker population.

And even though the Labor Department's proposed changes spanned 186 pages of text, in what officials called the program's most sweeping reform in 20 years, Cunha brushed the revisions off as inconsequential.

&quot;I believe it's a Band-Aid,&quot; Cunha said. &quot;It just ticks me off. It isn't going to help us at all.&quot;

Cunha, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others prefer legislation to enact a more ambitious agricultural guest-worker program that includes legalizing 1.5 million illegal immigrants. Growers and farmworker advocates negotiated the package over several years, but it died amid the wreckage of a broader Senate immigration bill last year.

&quot;Even with the proposed changes, the H-2A program will still have many of the problems that have made it unworkable for our diverse agriculture,&quot; California Farm Bureau Federation President Doug Mosebar said.

Some of the changes appear technical if not downright trivial.

Currently, for instance, growers must place two newspaper advertisements seeking U.S. workers before they can seek foreign workers. The growers will now have to place three newspaper ads.

Other changes are potentially more sweeping, though growers and farmworker advocates were still scrambling to understand them Wednesday.

&quot;We see this as making a bad situation worse,&quot; said Eric Nicholson, director of guest-worker programs for the United Farm Workers.

Farmworker wages, for instance, could change. The administration proposes using Labor Department instead of Agriculture Department data to calculate the &quot;adverse effect wage rate,&quot; which is a kind of minimum wage. This &quot;may raise the legally required wage rates in some areas while lowering them in others,&quot; the Labor Department predicted Wednesday.