A bill focused on bringing more workers to the agriculture industry could reach the U.S. Senate floor any day now.
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021 passed House in March of 2021. If it passes the Senate, the bill would create a new “certified agricultural worker” status for some immigrant employees, allowing them to stay in the U.S. for 5 1/2 years. The workers could also apply for permanent resident status after meeting certain requirements. The bill would also adjust the minimum wages for H-2A workers and specify a minimum number of hours they need to work.
Brantley Seifers, the national affairs coordinator with the Indiana Farm Bureau, said that the bill making it to the Senate is an exciting development.
“While it has been around for the past three or four years in the House, this Senate movement is kind of new,” he said. “And we do have some discussions going on about this getting passed in the lame duck Congress.”
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Local support for the bill is varied, but mostly positive. Seifers said that while the Indiana Farm Bureau and American Farm Bureau have some issues with the bill, they’re overall satisfied it’s being discussed.
“There's a couple of concerns that we had with the bill, however, we're very optimistic that this is compromise,” he said. “This is the first time we've heard it in the Senate. It's been a bipartisan vote up until now. We think we can get there in the Senate with some compromise on one way or the other on these things.”
One of the issues the Farm Bureau has with the bill is its cap on H-2A workers being too low.
“I believe it’s 20,000 a year, over several years, and we think that should be a little higher, half of that cap is for dairy alone,” Seifers said.
The other issue was the use of mandatory E-verify to confirm work eligibility for employees. “While we don't disagree with E-verify (as a concept), making it mandatory for just the ag sector is something that we would prefer not to see, making sure that we're not the guinea pigs when it comes to mandatory implementation of E-verify,” he said.
If it fails in the Senate, legislators will have to wait until the next session to try again.
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