It's Not Immigration, It's a Legal and Reliable Labor Supply

By Kevin Rogers, Arizona Farm Bureau
I cannot stress enough the importance of employers staying current with developments on employer sanctions and workplace enforcement. Greater diligence in hiring practices and proper record keeping will be a sea change for this generation of employers and employees. For the employer it means charting a more perilous path between business and legal risk. A legal and reliable labor supply is likely to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room for years to come.
 
Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit against the state employer sanctions law ( i.e. HB 2779), workplace enforcement is a fact of employers’ lives in the foreseeable future.
 
What can you do, at the present time?
 
  • You need absolute compliance with the I-9 process and hiring procedures. You need to audit your files. There are manuals and legal assistance available for the asking. Very clearly there are things you should and should not be doing, and guidance is needed.
 
  • You must become familiar with new social security mis-match rules (assuming this moves forward after court review).
 
  • Employers and their supervisors should not be having conversations with employees regarding whether they are work authorized in this country.
 
  • Apply your policies uniformly. More than ever employers will be walking a tightrope between areas of constructive knowledge of employing those not work authorized and discriminatory issues.
 
  • You need to know and understand the H-2A process, what it offers and its limitations. If you are not using it, you may have to, even without reform, and there are several reforms needed.
 
  • You must be creative in finding new mechanisms for recruiting labor. We are working on ways to assist you with this.
 
  • We must push for more technology to decrease our reliance on labor.
 
  • Continue to press your congressional delegation for fully integrated solutions to our immigration issues. We must fix our borders, our documents, reliable means of verifying them and our system of visas.
 
For agriculture, this is not so much an immigration issue but an issue of a legal and reliable labor supply. It remains an open question for all of us to be working on: How do we secure a labor supply to match the business risks we take?
Key Words: Immigration reform in Arizona, border security in Arizona