This damn government! WAKE the FUCK UP, AMERICA!!!
These Globalist bastards need to be THROWN OUT of OFFICE and their insane plans SCRAPPED!!
"Shortage on farms prompts US to rewrite foreign labor rules" by Nicole Gaouette, Los Angeles Times October 8, 2007
WASHINGTON - With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers legally can be brought into the country.
The urgent effort, underway at the US departments of Homeland Security, State, and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vise between a complex process to hire legal guest-workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of undocumented planters, pickers, and even middle managers crossing the border.
"It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a workforce and that is a factor of what is going on today."
The push to rewrite the regulations quickly is also the Bush administration's attempt to step into the breach left when Congress failed to pass an immigration measure in June. The legislation could have addressed the reality of American farms, where almost three-quarters of the workers are thought to be illegal immigrants.
On all sides of the farm industry, the administration's behind-the-scenes initiative to revamp H2A farmworker visas is fraught with anxiety.
Immigrant advocates fear the changes will come at the expense of worker protections because the administration has received and reportedly is acting on extensive input from farm lobbyists. And farmers in areas such as California's San Joaquin Valley, which is experiencing a 20 percent labor shortfall, worry the administration's changes will not happen soon enough for the 2008 growing season.
[Considering the debate and the way we were treated about Amnesty, what with all the insults and name-calling -- especially by the stinkshit press -- I'm not all that sympathetic to a bunch of Globalist illegals and their bitching about corporate abuse.
Sorry! :-|]
"It's like a ticking time bomb that's going to go off," said Luawanna Hallstrom, chief operating officer of Harry Singh & Sons, a third-generation family farm in Oceanside, Calif., that grows tomatoes. "I'm looking at my fellow farmers and saying, 'Oh my God, what's going on?' "
Officials at the three federal agencies are scrutinizing the regulations to see whether they can adjust the farmworker program, a highly bureaucratic system so unwieldy that less than 2 percent of American farms use it to bring in foreign workers.
They are considering changes, including lengthening the time workers can stay, expanding the types of work they can do, simplifying how their applications are processed, and even redefining terms such as "temporary."
The agencies also are working on possible changes to a separate visa H2B program that brings in seasonal workers.
The administration has pursued the project discreetly, perhaps wary of the friction that immigration has generated between President Bush and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has opposed many of the initiatives Bush has pursued."
How do you like that, Republicans?!?
This ought to FIRE UP the LOU DOBB'S CROWD!!!]
