S. 1645 and H.R. 3142
Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and
Security Act of 2003
JUST THE FACTS:

1. S. 1645\H.R. 3142 would have a giant impact (mostly for the worse) on numerous aspects of the United States when the need being expressed by most agricultural employers is a relatively small one.

The primary complaints about our current agricultural guestworker program (the H-2A nonimmigrant visa) are that the paperwork is too onerous, the time for processing too long, and the required adverse effect wage level too high. If this is the case, we don't need a radical change in our whole immigration and agricultural employment system but rather some modifications in current H-2A program.

2. S. 1645\H.R. 3142 contain two basic sections. The first creates an amnesty for illegal aliens currently working in agriculture. The second significantly modifies the current H-2A program.

S. 1645\H.R. 3142 would amnesty an estimated 860,000 illegal alien workers, plus their families, for a total of around three million. The 1986 Special Agricultural Worker amnesty proved that amnesties only serve to increase the flow of new illegal aliens into the country. Moreover, once agricultural workers are issued legal permanent residence, they tend to leave agricultural work, thereby leaving employers with the same incentives to hire illegal aliens that existed before the amnesty. Every problem the nation now has from illegal immigration would grow worse if S. 1645\H.R. 3142 passed. The legislation would act as a magnet for new illegal aliens hoping that, eventually, they too will be awarded amnesty and it would perpetuate a cycle by ensuring that new illegal aliens would enter to take the jobs abandoned by current illegal agricultural workers once they receive their green cards.

So S. 1645\H.R. 3142 would exacerbate an already untenable flow of illegal aliens, increasing the threat not only to the livelihoods and the quality of life of thousands of local communities but also to actual physical security because of enlarging the "sea in which criminals and terrorists can swim and escape detection."

3. Illegal alien workers seeking to qualify for amnesty under S. 1645\H.R. 3142 would be entitled only to minimum wage, despite the fact that all other nonimmigrants who come to the U.S. to work are guaranteed either the prevailing wage or the higher adverse effect wage.

Many H-2A employers believe that they should only have to pay the prevailing wage, rather than the adverse effect wage, as is currently required. This bill, however, goes beyond that by allowing agricultural employers to pay minimum wage to these aliens until they actually receive their green cards sometime in 2010. S. 1645\H.R. 3142 thus permit employers to artificially hold down wages since aliens seeking amnesty are in no position to press for the prevailing wage. This will undercut the wages the market otherwise would set for American and legally resident workers for these jobs and ensure that we repeatedly will be faced with an agricultural "labor shortage."