New York’s top agriculture official sees an opportunity for positive change in the nationwide crackdown on immigration, when it comes to the farm labor needed to produce the food and milk New Yorkers consume.
Richard Ball is New York State’s Commissioner of Agriculture and the owner of a working farm in Schoharie County. Nationwide, estimates are that 70% of all farm workers are foreign-born. He said the wave of raids aimed at catching people living in America illegally – raids that include farms – concern him but he also sees reason for optimism.
“We need a working guest worker program,” said Ball. "We need a legal workforce here in the United States.”
Ball said fixing the federal Guest Worker program that provides legal ways for foreign-born men and women to work legally in the country has amounted to "kicking the can down the road." It hasn't been updated since the 1980s, during the Reagan administration. Efforts to update the program under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama failed.
The recent detention of a mother and her two children at a farm in the North Country continues to cause concern in New York’s agricultural community. Though public pressure resulted in the family’s release, immigration and police agencies continue to raid farms and arrest workers suspected of being in the country illegally. Farmers and their advocates worry they won’t have enough workers to plant and harvest crops or maintain dairy farms and herds.
But Ball feels that the need to ensure America’s food supply is adequate provides pressure to improve the program.
“We were built by migrants,” he said. “The Statue of Liberty, and on and on. It’s a strength for the country as a whole and now we have another generational opportunity here and we just have to buckle down, get away from the platitudes, stop kicking it down the road and deal with a working Guest Worker program for that next generation of people.”
Ball said agriculture commissioners around the nation are working together to try to propose a new guest worker program.