House Pushes Amnesty, Subsidy for Lower-Tech, Cheap Labor Farms

House leaders will introduce a farmworker amnesty plan on Wednesday that will provide citizenship to at least one million illegal migrants and to a future flood of visa workers who agree to work on U.S. farms for eight years.

The “Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019” amnesty would create two huge streams of low-wage labor for farm companies and likely for meatpackers and other agricultural employers.

One stream would be from the population of one million existing farmworker illegal aliens who will be amnestied and redefined as “Certified Agricultural Workers” so they can get green cards and citizenship after several years — regardless of the “public charge” rule which bars welfare-reliant migrants from citizenship.

The second stream would come from illegal aliens who sign up to be legal H-2A visa farmworkers and from a treasure box of 40,000 green cards per year for employers to pay their lower-wage H-2A workers.

The bill also changes the existing H-2A farmworker visa program by setting a 3.25 percent cap on annual wage growth and by allowing some H-2A workers to work year-round for dairies or non-agriculture companies....

The bill mandates the use of the “E-Verify” program to exclude illegal aliens from the agriculture sector. That mandate gives legislators a talking point to be used against voters who oppose the amnesty. But Section 303 of the bill effectively kills the existing E-Verify program before the promised rollout of a to-be-designed replacement program....

The bill does not include subsidies for the robots or other labor-saving technology that could reduce the incentives for farm companies to hire many illegal aliens or H-2A visa workers....

The U.S. farmers’ reliance on cheap labor has reduced their incentive for the use of machines, while farm companies in many other countries are increasing their competitive advantage by investing in machines