(March 25, 2008) --Farmers are now facing harder times trying to make a living.
And Stephen Pringle, the legislative director for the Texas Farm Bureau is talking to U.S. Representatives to try and come up with a comprehensive immigration reform plan that includes a guest worker program.
"Farmers then can have a labor supply that they can depend on. That they can get their crops out on fields, that they can get their animals tended to," said Stephen Pringle.
Pringle says without help from migrant workers U.S. farmers will start looking for other ways to make money, like farming commodities that require machinery help instead of people to help harvest the crop.
And he says that could force our food to come from other countries.
"If you like the idea of getting 60% of our energy supplies from the middle east, then you will love getting your food supply from a third world country."
The federal government is now requiring farmers to screen their employees to make sure a worker's identification matches up.
Putting them in between a rock and a hard place.
"You're putting the producer in the bind of ,'Do I terminate this employee because I can be fined, or do I go broke because I can't get this product out of the field?'"
And that's forcing migrant worker numbers to drop and farmers to lose money.
When asked if there's another work force in the U.S. that can handle the various jobs, Pringle replied saying,
"No. There is not another work force that can take over those jobs in the United States."
Along with a guest worker program being included in immigration reform, pringle says two other factors the texas farm bureau wants included is border security and some type of handling of the millions of illegal aliens in the U.S.
But without the migrant workers, more farmers may be out of business.
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