June 19, 2013
www.gfb.org
Vol. 31 No. 25
FARM BUREAU URGES PASSAGE OF IMMIGRATION REFORM As the Senate considers more than 150 amendments to the comprehensive immigration reform bill, Georgia Farm Bureau has joined a group of 24 regional and state ag stakeholder organizations in urging Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson to support the bill. While the House has a bill setting up an agricultural guest worker program, the bill before the Senate, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act (S. 744), appears the best chance to move toward meaningful reform for the first time in more than two decades. “We’ve maintained our policy stand that it’s a federal issue and not a state issue, and now we have an environment where policy makers want to talk about immigration reform. We need that bill to pass the Senate to be able to continue that discussion,” GFB President Zippy Duvall said during a June 14 visit with county Farm Bureau leaders in South Georgia. Without the passage of S. 744, farmers’ struggles to access migrant laborers could continue for several years with the continuation of the current system. In the ag organizations’ June 7 letter to Chambliss and Isakson, the groups emphasized that point. “We believe it is vital to move this legislation through the Senate to keep the immigration reform process alive,” the letter said. “The important thing at this point is for legislation to emerge from both chambers that can be reconciled in conference to ensure a workable, flexible and market-based solution to address our labor needs.” Duvall was invited to write a guest editorial that was published in the Atlanta JournalConstitution on June 13. In it, he outlined the difficulties farmers face in acquiring adequate labor, from the physical nature of the work to the burdensome requirements of the H-2A program. “If the Senate fails to act, the American people will keep the same flawed immigration policy we have right now,” Duvall wrote. “Nobody will be happy with that.” While S. 744 tackles issues related to border security, it also addresses farm labor, setting up a “blue card” program that allows experienced agricultural workers the opportunity to obtain legal immigration status. In a related development on the House agricultural guest worker bill (H.R. 1773), American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) on June 17 voicing Farm Bureau’s unequivocal support for passage of the bill. The committee was scheduled to mark up the guest worker bill, as well as the SAFE Act, a bill to modify the interior enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.