Idaho farmers: We need immigrant workers

Jim Little of Emmett says the government is making it too difficult for Idaho farmers to follow the rules and employ legal immigrants rather than border jumpers. “It seems like they take great joy in piling on minutia and things we have to do,” said Little, who grows grain and hay and is the brother of Lt. Gov. Brad Little. There’s widespread frustration among farmers in Idaho and across the country over the H-2A visa program for seasonal agriculture workers. The foreign workers are eager to do physical labor Americans won’t, they say. A bipartisan group of six U.S. senators from Idaho, Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Wyoming wrote the Department of Labor to express concerns with the system “and its serious implication on producers and our nation’s food supply.” Frustration over the visa program helped drive Little’s daughter, Rochelle Oxarango, and her husband mostly out of the Idaho sheep-ranching business. “We needed four new workers from Peru. I started the paperwork in July and our workers didn’t arrive until February,” Oxarango said in an interview. “It’s really hard to depend on a program that takes that long to get workers here. We had to sell most of our sheep last year and this was one of the driving factors. It was just getting too hard to manage the labor situation.” Employers say that to use the program, they must deal with complicated paperwork and go through multiple federal agencies: the Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. The recent letter from the six senators, including Idaho’s Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, cited “numerous cases in which unnecessary administrative delays resulted in not having enough labor to perform needed work.”...more