H-2A employers find complications with COVID-19 outbreak

Last year, the H-2A program brought in more than 200,000 guest workers, the biggest number yet, and growth was expected again this year. For Shay Myers, CEO of Owyhee Produce, Nyssa, Ore., the delays in processing H-2A workers will cost him the company’s asparagus and sweet potato crops. The company was planning to bring in 48 H-2A workers from Mexico to harvest the firm’s asparagus crop and then help plant the sweet potato crop. State Department officials, however, told him they could only deliver five workers to his farm when harvest begins in early April. “We will lose our entire asparagus crop,” and won’t be able to plant sweet potatoes, he said March 18.Farmers who use the H-2A guest worker program are facing COVID-19-related delays in the processing and approval of those workers. Effective March 18, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico said the embassy and all U.S. consulates in Mexico will suspend routine immigrant and non-immigrant visa services because of social distancing precautions related to the global pandemic COVID-19. On the heels of that, the Department of Homeland Security on March 19 issued a document on what it is calling the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce during the outbreak, putting farm workers and people in the food supply chain in that group...MORE