Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

12/6/01  News Report -- Associated Press

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- Tougher immigration enforcement since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has contributed to a shortage of migrant farm labor in New York state and around the country, according to farm officials.

The harvest of New York's apple crop, short of pickers, continued into mid-November, said John Lincoln, president of the New York Farm Bureau. The unusually dry weather was fortunate, he said, because a lot of fruit otherwise would have spoiled.

''In a lot of areas of the country we are short of labor,'' said Robert Stallman, national president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. U.S. agriculture needs an adequate labor supply, unavailable at home, and he said they had been making progress on that point with the Bush administration.

However, tougher immigration and border enforcement, for security reasons since the Sept. 11 plane hijackings by Middle Eastern terrorists has changed the landscape, Stallman said.

Farmers were already having a problem with immigration authorities suddenly deporting workers who are illegal aliens, according to Lincoln, a Rochester-area dairy farmer. Sometimes workers go to a store or laundry staked out by agents and simply don't return, he said.

''We've had a problem the last two or three years,'' Lincoln said, so that didn't appear to change. But in light of the national crackdown this fall, some nervous workers simply left on their own, he said.

''I think more people, Mexicans and Guatemalans, wanted to go back home and went back home,'' Lincoln said Thursday during the state bureau's annual meeting.

While farmers will check laborers' papers, they are not in the enforcement business, said Alan Knight, spokesman for the 32,000-member New York Farm Bureau.

Stallman, a Texas cattleman, said farmers need a new national program like the one that specifically permits Jamaican workers to come to the U.S. for limited periods.

On another homeland defense issue, Stallman said the bio-terrorist threat to the food supply appears to be limited, depending on a prompt response to any outbreak.

American agriculture is diversified, and plant pathogens, which might damage a particular crop, would generally have little effect on other crops, Stallman said. The threat to livestock is probably greater, he said.

A U.S. outbreak of highly transmittable foot-and-mouth disease could collapse the export market for pork and beef, Stallman said. However, there hasn't been an outbreak here since 1929, he said, and despite recent incidents in Europe, agricultural inspectors have managed to keep it out.

In Britain, about 4 million cattle, sheep and pigs were slaughtered this year, though the number of confirmed cases of disease was 2,030, according to government data. Foot-and-mouth causes wasting in cloven-hoofed animals. It is not infectious to humans.

U.S. and state agricultural officials, and farmers themselves, have increased their vigilance, Farm Bureau officials said. Lincoln requires visitors to his dairy barn to wear plastic boots so they can't track in anything, and he said many farms now have signs posted against visitors without permission.
the INS. Mexico and El Salvador "are pretty good about taking their people back," he said. "The majority of the people arrested today ... will probably be back in Mexico on Wednesday."