Master: Green Card?

Guest-worker legislation inserted into Iraq spending bill

By CAROLYN LOCHHEAD
c.2008 San Francisco Chronicle

Washington — Two of California's most immigrant-dependent industries — agriculture and Silicon Valley — are pushing narrow measures through Congress in an effort to get foreign workers at opposite ends of the labor market, people who pick vegetables and the post graduate engineers and scientists of Silicon Valley.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein attached a new farm guest worker program to the giant Iraq spending bill Thursday in a last-ditch effort to remedy a shortage of workers in California's produce fields as the federal government continues to crack down on illegal immigration and the political climate proves hostile to more sweeping measures.

At the same time, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, teaming with Republicans, is pushing several bills to give permanent residence to top engineering talent.

"It's an emergency," Feinstein said of the farm worker situation. "If you can't get people to prune, to plant, to pick, to pack, you can't run a farm."

The bill would provide temporary legal status to 1.3 million farm workers during the next five years, but no path to citizenship or permanent residency. It passed the Appropriations Committee 17 to 12 Thursday.

Workers applying for the program would have to prove they had worked on U.S. farms for at least 150 days or 863 hours, or earned at least $17,000, during the last four years. They would have to remain working in agriculture for the next five years. The program would sunset after five years.

The move marks an end for now to efforts to give farm workers a path to citizenship, after a sweeping immigration bill crashed in the Senate last June. Feinstein has been trying all year to attach a bill called AgJobs but has met nothing but dead ends.

Western Growers, representing California farmers, and the United Farm Workers of American union, joined in backing the bill. Western Growers President Tom Nassif said large growers are accelerating efforts to move their farming operations to Mexico. The 15 growers out of several hundred who responded to a survey and were willing to talk about their plans alone moved 84,000 acres worth of crop production to Mexico this year, twice as many acres as last year, Nassif said.

"Once the acreage moves to Mexico it's there permanently," Nassif said. "Much of the remaining open space in California is agricultural land," he said. "If it's not farmed, we'd be growing condos or cementing it over with office buildings."

The tightening of the border has made it increasingly difficult, dangerous and expensive for laborers to return to the United States if they leave, disrupting the traditional circular flow of farm workers from Mexico to California's fields in the Salinas and Central Valleys. Most farm workers arrive illegally, and farmers complain that an existing guest worker program called H2A is cumbersome and ineffective. Feinstein's bill would streamline its rules.

Growers are apprehensive about a new administration effort, temporarily stopped by a federal court, that would require employers to match workers with a valid Social Security number or be heavily fined. The Department of Homeland Security is refining the rule to get past court objections.

United Farmworkers President Arturo Rodriguez said farming is facing "a very real emergency," and applauded the bill as a "critical but temporary fix to a much larger problem."

Feinstein acknowledged that the chances of getting the bill all the way through Congress, even attached to war spending, is "uphill all the way."

On the other side of the Capitol, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, is teaming with conservative Republicans to try to push similar discreetly targeted measures for Silicon Valley. She has dropped efforts for now to expand the controversial H1-B program for temporary high-skilled workers, which again this year ran out of its 85,000 visas on the first day they were released. Lofgren said the program needs changes, given its wide use by Indian offshoring companies.

Instead, Lofgren has introduced a passel of five small-bore immigration bills, among them one that would allow masters' and doctoral graduates from U.S. universities to apply immediately for permanent residence, skipping the H-1B program altogether.

"Most people would agree if you get your Ph.D in engineering from an American university, you've got something to offer this country," Lofgren said. "Right now we have no ability to keep those people here ... we send them home to compete against Americans. It would make more sense to keep them here to help us compete."

Lofgren has even teamed on one bill, to "recapture" unused permanent resident slots, with Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican famous as the author of immigration crackdown legislation, never enacted, that was so harsh it led to the nation's first large-scale Latino protests in 2006.

"What's happened is that with the shortage of very high level people, multinational companies are sending their project teams offshore," Lofgren said. "Not only the top hot-shot leading the team, but all the support jobs that go with that hot shot. Among the people I've met is a guy who spent four years at Harvard, seven at Stanford's engineering school, then did practical training and has been here six years on an H1B and he's in limbo. He's an extremely talented person and has no idea what his future is going to be. He's being recruited in Australia and Europe and he's ready to bail out. What he needs is not more temporary time."

Members of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group of business executives spent Thursday lobbying Congress on high-skilled immigration and tax breaks for solar energy and research and development.

"This is no time to say to high-skilled workers in a global economy that we don't want you," said Barry Cinnamon, chief executive of Akeena Solar in Los Gatos. "We're happy to have that argument with anyone."