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Iowa murder draws attention to agriculture industry's hiring of undocumented immigrants

Dane Lang, a co-owner of Yarrabee Farms outside of Brooklyn, Iowa, stood outside his family farm this week and lamented that he had employed the undocumented immigrant charged in the murder of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts.

Then he was asked if any other non-U.S. citizens were among the 10 employees on the dairy farm.

"I don't think I can comment to that," Lang said.

That vague answer highlights the worst-kept secret in the agriculture business: roughly half of the nation's 1.4 million field workers (47 percent, or 685,000 workers) are undocumented immigrants. And that estimate, from the Labor Department, is a conservative one with labor experts citing far higher percentages.

While presidents have approached undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. in vastly different ways, Republicans and Democratic administrations — under heavy lobbying from the agricultural industry — have always treated undocumented farm workers differently.

While the federal government was herding more than 100,000 Japanese immigrants into internment camps during World War II, it was also administering the Bracero Program, which allowed millions of Mexicans to enter the U.S. to work on farms.
charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' death, initially said they used that program to screen Rivera, but later backtracked and conceded that they had used a different system not designed to flag immigration violations.

"That would have a pretty big impact on future flows of illegal immigration," Chmielenski said.

When President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark immigration law in 1986 that granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants, those who worked on farms were given the easiest path to U.S. citizenship.

A bipartisan immigration reform bill that passed the Senate (but not the House) in 2013 would have created a special "blue card" just for agricultural workers and their immediate families that granted them legal status and the chance to become U.S. citizens.

And now, many Republicans are citing Tibbetts' death as a reason to pass a bill requiring all U.S. companies to use the federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of all job applicants. But even that bill — the Legal Workforce Act filed by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas — gives farmers 2.5 years before they must start vetting their field workers, the only such exception.

Chris Chmielenski, deputy director of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said that history reflects both the power of the agricultural industry, and the willingness of politicians to help them out.

He says the easiest solution would be to require that all U.S. business use E-Verify, which allows employers to check the immigration status of job applicants using a government website. The Iowa farm that employed Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who is

But farmers, ranchers, and other business owners who rely on undocumented immigrants say passing an E-Verify bill would cripple their industries. Already struggling to recruit enough Americans to do the back-breaking field work, and operating under the constant threat of raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they say implementing E-Verify with no other changes to the immigration system would put untold numbers of companies out of business.

That's why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that it would only support mandatory electronic worker verification if it's coupled with an overhaul, and expansion, of the country's guest worker programs. The American Farm Bureau Federation goes a step further, arguing that passing E-Verify alone would cause production to drop by $60 billion and food prices to increase by 5 to 6 percent.

"Farmers and ranchers get that we have immigration laws in our country, and they want nothing more than to be able to attain their workers legally," said John-Walt Boatright, the national affairs coordinator for the Florida Farm Bureau. "But we cannot have E-Verify without a workable, functioning, accessible guest work program in place."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/08/24/iowa-murder-casts-spotlight-farms-hiring-undocumented-immigrants/1075320002/