U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) was keynote speaker Monday, Dec. 9 at the 2019 NGFA Country Elevator Conference (#CEC19) in Indianapolis, IN.
Here is an excerpt of his comments on the status of U.S. immigration policy during a sit-down Q&A with NGFA President and CEO Randy Gordon.
Audience: Could you speak to the current status of immigration policy change? It seems to have lost its place in the national discussion.
Sonny Perdue: It seems to have kind of lost its place in the national conversation, well, a lot of things have lost their place with the shenanigans going on in D.C., but I can tell you it hasn't lost attention to this administration.
Depending on where you are, it’s the number one or number two most important issue I hear from farm groups all across the country. The fact is we do not have enough domestic people who want to work on farms these days while we mechanize and add new technology. We can't catch up fast enough. Where we develop and design robotics, we still are going to need labor for a foreseeable future.
So we're working with the administration leadership and directly with the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Labor, not just to modernize the H-2A program but to develop a reliable legal ag worker guest's program going forward. We hope that to be introduced sometime after the first of the year. It will be with a companion legislation that deals with what the president has talked about, a merit-based immigration policy based on the kind of people we want to be here to become citizens to grow the economy, as well as border security.
But on the other hand, we also need the lower-skilled people. They want to come to help grow our economy but don't necessarily have any interest in becoming citizens. They just want to come for economic freedom, and we need to have a way that they can come and contribute, go back to their home countries. We're working with Guatemala and Mexico to develop a pre-certified group of people that they have vetted, who they know, whether they're helping them train or whatever, to come up for economic opportunity and then to send money back and either learn the skills of farming that they could utilize in their own countries. So we're working on that. I hope it to be introduced sometimes after the first of the year, and it'll be obviously debated. There is a bill in the house from California that's very much employee-based from an amnesty-type provision that the administration I don't think will support nor could support in that area for those people who are here illegally currently.