Text3Americanfarmershavebeencomplainingoflaborshor...[MBA][英语二]

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American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years now. The complaintsare unlikely to stop without an overhaul of immigration rules for far workers. Efforts to create a morestraightforward agricultural-workers visa that would enable foreign workers to stay longer inthe U. Sand change jobs within the industry have so far failed in Congress. If this doesn't change, Americanbusinesses, communities and consumers will be the losers.

Perhaps half of U. S. farm laborers are undocumented immigrants.As fewer such workers enter theU. S, the characteristics of the agricultural workforce are changing. 32. Today’s farm laborers, while stillpredominantly born in Mexico, are more likely to be settled, rather than migrating, and more likely to bemarried than single. They are also aging. At the start of this century, about one-third of crop workerswere over the age of 35. Now, more than half are.And crop picking is hard on older bodies.

One oft-debated cure for this labor shortageremains as implausible as it has been all along: NativeU.S. workers won't be returning to the farm.

Mechanization is not the answer either----not yet at least. Production of com, cotton, rice, soybeansand wheat have been largely mechanized, but many high-value, labor-intensive crops, such asstrawberries need labor.Even dairy farms, where robots currently do only a small share of milking, havea long way to go before they are automated.

As a result, farms have grown increasingly reliant on temporary guest workers using the H-2A visato fill the gaps in the agricultural workforce. Starting around 2012, requests for the visas rose sharply:from 2011 to 20 16 the number of visas issued more than doubled.

The H-2A visa has no numerical cap,unlike the H-2B visa for nonagricultural work, which islimited to 66,000 annually. Even so, employers frequently complain that they aren't allotted allworkers they need. The process is cumbersome, expensive and unreliable. One survey found thatbureaucratic delays led H-2A workers to arrive on the job an average of 22 days late. And the shortageis compounded by federal immigration raids, which remove some workers and drive others underground.

In effect, the U.S. can import food or it can import the workers who pick it. The U.S. needs asimpler, streamlined, multi-year visa for agricultural workers, accompanied by measures to guard againstexploitation and a viable path to U. S.residency for workers who meet the requirements. Otherwisegrowers will continue to struggle with shortages and uncertainty, and the country as a whole will loseout.