Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling that allows the executive branch sweeping authority over temporary protected status, or TPS, John Hollay, president and CEO of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, joined U.S. Farm Report to share its potential impact in agriculture.
TPS, a humanitarian program, allows foreign nationals to live and work legally in the U.S. if their home countries are unsafe due to war or natural disasters. This Supreme Court decision paved the way for the U.S. government to wind down TPS protections for Haiti and Syria and stripped work permits for people with TPS from those countries.
Hollay says the visa expiration of Haitian and Syrian immigrants will likely affect specialty crop agriculture.
“We’re going to see impact, particularly in fruit and vegetable production in Florida,” he says. “Also in the Carolinas, a lot of these communities work in different commodities, but those are the regions in which a lot of these workers are operating.”
Hollay says this will likely impact meat processing as well. He says policy organization FWD.us recently estimated about 15,000 people working in agriculture from Haiti would be impacted, along with another 7,000 that work in processing.
“It’s a significant part of the workforce spread out amongst the country,” he says. “It may not be as impactful, but for those communities in which these individuals are clustered, it’s a significant impact for those agricultural industries.”
Hollay says while it’s hard to identify exactly what commodities are seeing the impact, “if you look geographically, obviously our citrus folks down in Florida are definitely seeing it, and then some of our general vegetable growers in the Carolinas, again in Florida, are also seeing the impact.”
The removal of these visas is just another pressure that the agriculture industry faces with labor, he says.
“The TPS protection is something different, I should say, than an H-2A visa program,” he says. “But the need is still there in agriculture. So, when these workers go away, what we’re going to need is those other programs like H-2A to really help fill the void and to send the message to workers around the world that the U.S. may need your services.”
Hollay says that as the agriculture industry regroups from losing these workers, it’s essential that Congress moves forward with the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act.
“If we don’t act, these kind of issues are not just going to be one-time things,” he says. “They’re going to be issues that continue to erode the rural fabric of this country. So, we certainly hope that it will get some folks’ eyeballs on the issue, not only of what’s going on with these individuals in the TPS situation, but what’s going on with the agricultural communities in which they’ve helped work in.”
