It’s almost always harvest season for something in Florida.
Well, not for big cash crops, of course. Even the wonders of the Sunshine State can’t produce enough to keep its farms humming through the long winter in the United States.
But, seasons come and go really fast. Before you know it, April will be here - just 90 days or so and Florida’s farms will start producing blueberries and peaches and strawberries, then watermelon and cantaloupes. They won’t last, of course, but other crops will fill in.
Oranges and grapefruits will start to be picked even before the blueberries are gone, and in turn that harvest will end in May, but the tomato harvest will last until June. Come fall and squash and cucumber and sweet corn - which can’t take the summer heat - will be back.
Add a few weeks, and the same kind of calendar will be followed by farmers in the Carolinas and Georgia, Virginia and New Jersey, and all the way up to New England. And Texas and California and most of the other states - Hawaii has a growing season all its own.
But there may be something different this year, something that isn’t being discussed right now by a lot of people who should know better. There may not be enough workers around to harvest those crops, and without them we will see some really expensive composting on farms from Alabama to Augusta.
Yep, its the migrants. You know, the ones who sneak across the border even though we have already built a lot of that big, beautiful wall - somehow they manage to get around it after walking hundreds of miles, carrying tons of illicit narcotics on their backs - and also the very legal ones, who manage to get special visas for temporary agricultural workers.
Now they don’t get the visas, of course. The farm owners get them. It’s called an H-2A visa, and it’s an interesting process.
First the farmers have to sign a form saying they have searched the labor market and can not find American workers to fill the job, and then swear swear to pay those migrants the same wages they would have paid to American workers, if they could find any. It gets a little complicated really fast, since farmers don’t pay the same minimum wage, but have to supply food and housing and medical care and see that the children of those workers get schooling.
So how many are there?
Well, as you might guess, the numbers are hard to come by. Different advocacy groups and different government sources give out different numbers, from unbelievably low to a high of more than a million. But let’s just look at one official number - 74,859. That’s how many H-2A visas were issued in 2017.
(Guess what - the visa isn’t necessarily for a single worker. In practice, it can cover several people, and be sold - in a kind of underground gray market - to another farmer. You need Juan from mid-March to mid-April and getting the visa is expensive, so you offer to let another farmer use him from mid-April to mid-July. What could go wrong?)
Well, this year is different. Why? Well, the government is shut down. No one is processing visa applications. No migrants are sneaking across the border to work for two or three dollars an hour under the hot sun.
And the President vows that he will keep the government shut down until he gets his five billion dollars for his wall. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he would not even allow a vote on a budget bill that the President wouldn’t sign. He says that loud and often and smugly.
Now McConnell is Kentucky’s senior senator, and appears to be solidly supported by his fellow Republicans and by his state. Maybe it’s because the h-2A program is so popular there - they had more than 5,000 workers under that program in 2009 ( the most recent figure I could confirm) and I saw an on-line ad this week seeking workers for farm jobs in Kentucky (no skills necessary) that would pay $18 to $30 an hour.
Now I may not be as smart as Senator McConnell, but those few facts alone seem to tell me that keeping the government shut-down going may not be such a good idea for the bluegrass state.
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