House passes farmworker bill on bipartisan vote

The House on a bipartisan vote Wednesday passed what’s commonly known as the farmworker bill.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would allow farmworkers already working in the country to earn legal residency. Employers would benefit from wage-stabilization measures, lower housing costs and streamlined guest-worker applications – but they would also have to submit to a computerized system for verifying employees’ legal status.

It passed on a 260-165 vote arrived at after nearly two years of negotiations between House Democrats and Republicans. Now, it faces even more uncertainty in the Senate.

“Though we’re heartened by the House vote, we realize there’s a lot of work still needed to advance this legislation to the president,” California Farm Bureau Federation president Jamie Johansson said in a release. “We will put in that work in order to deal fairly with the existing farm workforce and their immediate families, to make the H-2A guestworker program more valuable and flexible, and to ease the chronic employee shortages that have troubled so many farms and ranches around the country.”

More than 300 industry groups including the United Farm Workers have backed the measure.

Fresno’s Democratic House members hailed the vote:

Rep. TJ Cox, the freshman who presided over the House floor during the vote, said in a release: “It was a priority for me to be part of this bipartisan process because today there are people in my district who may go the rest of their lives without seeing their loved ones outside the U.S., for fear of getting picked up and being undocumented. There are also farmers in my district whose dairies will or already have gone under, partly because they don’t have a steady source of skilled agricultural workers. We shouldn’t accept this policy failure by our government as the status quo.”

Rep. Jim Costa said in a tweet, “This is an historic moment for farming communities across America, especially here in California and the San Joaquin Valley. Farmworkers are part of our communities and are some of the hardest working people I’ve met.”