Word: guesting
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Earl Deal's Smokey Holler Tree Farm in western North Carolina won the arboreal equivalent of American Idol in 2005 when one of its Fraser firs was chosen as the White House Christmas tree. Many of Deal's guest workers come back year after year. In turn, they are given decent housing and a legal way to earn a good wage. But when I visited them last year, many were jealous of the one worker at the farm who said he was in the U.S. illegally (like most other employers, Deal is simply unable to tell a good...
...fragile Senate bill rests on three pillars: legalization of illegal residents, tighter border controls and the creation of a new guest-worker program that would grant up to 200,000 two-year visas annually. North Carolina, which imports more legal farmworkers than any other state, offers an idea of how the guest-worker proposal might look in action. During the past growing season, I canvassed the state, from the Christmas-tree farms in the western mountains to the crab plants on the eastern shore, and found a guest-worker program that is orderly, rational, legal--and almost completely unworkable...
...collapsing from within," is how Stan Eury, director of the North Carolina Growers Association, puts it. He had 10,000 workers in 2000 but only 6,400 this year. Employers complain about the spiraling costs of wages, transportation, government fees and housing. Activists worry about exploitation. Economists say guest-worker programs may look like a flexible solution to the nation's seasonal agricultural needs, but they inevitably grow rigid under a tangle of red tape...
...definition, guest workers are tremendously vulnerable. And of all the steps in the process, none is more ripe for abuse than the recruiting of workers back in their home countries. Baldemar Velasquez, whose Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) has been the union representing Eury's workers since 2004, says Eury recruits cleanly. But freelance agents who work with other recruiters and employers are not nearly so scrupulous. Peasants, lured at times by false promises about what they can earn, are being charged as much as $2,000 to get on recruiters' lists for U.S. positions. If the Senate plan does...
...they can devastate farmers. Crops rotted on the vine across the U.S. in a ripple effect from last year's slight uptick in immigration enforcement; imagine what a wholesale move to a perennially backlogged system could bring. David Card, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, says guest-worker programs are simply too stiff to fit with the dynamic U.S. market, both inside and outside agriculture. "Our strength is that our economy is fluid," he says. "If we need labor all of a sudden in New Orleans, the workers just show up. Once you rely on a guest...