Senate legislation shows clear lack of understanding of ag labor
Using H-2A visas to hire migrant workers in our state, and every other state in the United States, is a last resort. The program was designed to be expensive to give preference to the local workforce.
For local labor advocates who complain about foreign-born workers displacing local workers, there is only one question to be asked: where are they? For the 2021 work season, Washington state’s labor shortage in agriculture has been certified by the U.S. Department of Labor as 25,000 people. Those workers come from outside the United States to help grow and harvest our crops.
The H-2A program is a federal temporary agricultural worker visa program administered by the state providing legal farm labor to farmers all over the state, and country. In a perfect world, the state and federal governments would work in concert, something akin to dancers both uniquely individual but also seamlessly joined together.
Instead, the program is clumsy and expensive – costing an average of $1,500 per worker application – and will become even more cumbersome should SB 5396 find its way through the legislative process. The bill seeks to incentivize the building of farmworker housing by providing farmers with a tax break when building new housing for their employees. The tax break cannot be used for housing in which H-2A workers live.
The specific mention of H-2A housing points to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the visa program operates. Farmers must advertise for a local workforce first. Only after farmers have advertised for 60 days and demonstrate they do not have enough local labor available to fill the available positions, are they able to apply for H-2A worker visas.
Based upon the structure of the hiring process, farmworker housing in our state is initially built for all employees. If farmers used the tax credit to build housing, they could not use it to house H-2A workers. This effectively forces farmers to build completely separate housing units without a guarantee they will be used annually.
Whatever benefit farmers receive from the tax break is undermined by the need to limit housing to local workers. Farmers would simply end up having to build twice as much housing to meet their employee housing needs.