Alexandra Allen, owner of Main Street Produce and Freshway Farms, has operated her Santa Maria-based businesses alongside her husband since the ’70s. But only in the last few years did they begin to use the H-2A program, which allows foreign agricultural workers to labor in the U.S. on a temporary visa.
“The H-2A program has been around for a long time, but we, like many growers, didn’t pay much attention to it because it just seemed so prohibitively expensive,” Allen told the Sun.
Those who bring in H-2A labor must feed and house their guest workers, and employers are required to pay them what’s called an “adverse effect wage rate.”
“The philosophy behind that makes perfect sense,” Allen said. “They require you to pay this heightened wage because our government wants to make sure that we are not hiring foreign workers if there are domestic workers available.”
But the overwhelming reality, particularly in recent years, is that there aren’t enough domestic workers to cover the farm labor needs in Santa Maria, according to Allen. Her company started by employing a couple dozen H-2A workers three years ago. It’s more expensive, but Allen said they had no other choice. This season, they will bring in about 250 workers.
“Here in the Santa Maria Valley, we produce food that feeds the country and many parts of the world, and that demand is continuing to grow. … That’s a good thing,” Allen said. “But the workforce is not increasing commensurately with the demands. As immigration has tightened, as the Mexican economy has improved, we don’t have the number of people who want to come to this country and work in agriculture that we used to.”
That’s why Allen supports the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill recently reintroduced by U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) and a group of bipartisan House members that aims to streamline the H-2A program and provide a path to legal status for farmworkers. The act was passed in the House on March 18, introduced in the Senate a few days later, and then referred to the Committee on the Judiciary for study.
Once the committee releases the bill, it will be brought back to the Senate for a vote.
“In essence, we are creating a modern-day guest worker program that would allow employers to address some of the challenges that they have with the existing H-2A program,” Carbajal told the Sun. He said those challenges include recruitment, the filing process, reducing costs associated with the visa process, and reforming H-2A wages.
The bill also creates a new type of temporary status called a “certified agricultural worker,” Carbajal said. Applicants who show that they’ve worked 180 days of agricultural employment over the past two years and pass a background check can achieve the renewable, temporary status.
Those who earn the status and continue to work in agriculture for another four to eight years (depending on how long they worked before the legislation’s enactment) can then apply for a green card, if they desire. Achieving this legal permanent residence then allows them to pursue citizenship, just like anyone else who holds a green card, Carbajal said.
“We’ve been hearing about it for a long time, and we’re very hopeful that Senate can make this work this time around,” Allen said of the legislation. “I think we saw during COVID how important having a safe and reliable food supply is. Never before in my lifetime had I experienced walking into a grocery store and seeing bare shelves.”
The Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), a farmworker advocacy organization, also supports the legislation.
“This is really impactful to the Santa Maria economy,” CAUSE Policy Advocate Rebeca Garcia said. “It would create a stable workforce for our agricultural industry, while at the same time bringing that needed ease for our farmworker community to feel comfortable in their jobs. That opens up the door for them to become more included in the community.”
The certified agricultural worker status “would take away the worry and the fear that a lot of our farmworkers exist with,” Garcia said.
“The majority of the nation’s farmworkers are undocumented. That’s 2.4 million farmworkers … living with that constant fear of deportation,” she continued. “Giving them the [certified agricultural worker] status would bring a lot of relief in that way, and then having that path to citizenship on top of that is a new conversation for our farmworkers.”
Garcia said CAUSE would like to see H-2A reform legislation go further in protecting and regulating housing.
“Given the pandemic, Santa Maria has specifically seen the consequences of not providing safe H-2A housing that allows people to socially distance,” she said.
CAUSE warned early on in the pandemic that the tight living conditions H-2A workers typically have could increase the risk of infection and spread. A July 2020 COVID-19 outbreak among Alco Harvesting workers living in H-2A housing confirmed this fear, when 95 workers were infected and one man died.
Garcia said that the bill’s proposed nationwide E-Verify system is a step in the right direction for regulating the guest worker program. It would be phased in after the legalization and H-2A reforms are implemented, Carbajal said.
“Farmers will have a system by which they will vet people that are here,” Carbajal said. “That was part of the compromise that was reached.”
All but one of the House Democrats voted to pass the bill March 18, and 30 Republicans also voted in favor.
“This has been a great bipartisan effort, and I think provides a model for how we can work together on our continued immigration efforts that we are no doubt going to be working on,” Carbajal said.
Staff Writer Malea Martin can be reached at mmartin@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 22-29, 2021.