immigration

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Immigration Insights | The Online NewsHour | PBS

Immigration Insights | The Online NewsHour | PBS

South Carolina peach farmer Chalmers Carr talks about immigration in the next installment in the NewsHour’s series.

I was a little concerned when I first saw him appear on the television screen but when he starting talking about migrant workers I found myself agreeing with everything he said about the migrant worker/visa issue. We are still waiting for the visa for Pedro so he can return legally. In a perfect world he would have been back working for us in the middle of June. Considering all of the paperwork that I have done to get this far, I have to say our immigration system is set up to discourage legal entry by Mexican. Since our system is making legal entry a pain in the butt you are encouraging the average Mexican woker to seriously consider illegal entry and for the average U.S. business employing Mexican workers to look the other way. The migrant worker visa program needs to streamlined to encourage foreign workers and U. S. businesses to strive to be legal. This part of the immigration problem could be fixed with longer visa’s and reduced annual paperwork.

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How the immigraton fuss affects small farms

We have a small farm and we hire several people to help us with the work. For a long time we used local people with mixed success. Last year we hired a Mexican worker, Pedro, who was here on a H2B visa. He has been great. We pay a little more for him but we use one worker where we used to use two. Part of the explanation is that he is male, physcally capable of doing the work without injury, and does not mind working alone. We used to use two female workers and they were happiest if they worked as a group and split the work. Even then the work was physically tasking for them. The females easily preferred grooming over stall cleaning even if it meant less hours. So we found a happy medium for our workers.

Now we have a problem because imigration(illegal alien worker) issues is the hot political issue. Our man had come in on a group visa approval and the government is not approving groups anymore. That’s too bad! The cost to the farm was minimal. Since I prefer to follow the laws I put him on a payroll, paid overtime, and withheld taxes just like any other employee. His cost for the visa was about $300. That is a lot of money but he felt it was pretty reasonable. We had a mutually acceptable plan.

His lawyer recommended that our farm sponsor him. Pedro was getting pretty anxious about the situation so he had a friend write us a letter asking us to help him. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours translating his note and reading the legal papers his lawyer sent us. We are going to sponsor him but it is going to cost almost $1,000 if we are approved. I won’t go in to the details of how we manage the increased cost. Except for the fact that our costs are going up because of this political mess, this immigration mess is much ado about nothing.  If we are not approved, we will be a mess for awhile. Assuming we are approved, we don’t expect to change much.

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Thought for the Day

You read about all these terrorists — most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these expired visas, some for as long as 10 -15 years. Now, compare that to Blockbuster; you are two days late with a video and those people are all over you. Let's put Blockbuster in charge of immigration.

from an anonymous email