U.S.: Situation eases for stranded farmworkers at Mexican border - FreshFruitPortal.com

U.S.: Situation eases for stranded farmworkers at Mexican border

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U.S.: Situation eases for stranded farmworkers at Mexican border

After hundreds of guest farmworkers were left stranded at the U.S.-Mexico border due to a computer glitch, an industry source has confirmed the situation has now improved.cerezas_70231672

After a State Department database crashed on June 9, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) managed to process fewer than half the applications it had received seeking H-2A visas for temporary farm employment, leaving some 1,500 workers in the Mexican border town of Tijuana for a couple of weeks.

The problems came at a time when many growers in Washington were beginning to harvest their cherry crops.

Dan Fazio, director of the Washington Farm Labor Association (WAFLA), which sponsors hundreds of those stranded workers, told www.freshfruitportal.com the vast majority had since made it legally over the border.

"I don't think that there are any farmworkers stranded right now," he said, adding this year the association had been 'lucky' as it had pushed the timing forward and brought most of the workers over before June 1.

"This system has kind of been giving us problems for a couple of months now and it crashed on June 9. What we did is we found a work-around in the law which would enable an emergency visa waiver in cases where they would not print the visa.

"The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security are mixed up about it, so we haven't gotten an official word from them, although they have, I understand, allowed the emergency visa waivers for some of the farmworkers that were stranded."

He added the State Department had been working to clear the backlog but was unsure as to why the system wasn't working.

According to Fazio, Washington State is the second-largest user of seasonal workers in the country, behind California.

"No one on the West Coast had really tried to use the guest worker program until we started in 2007. We went from basically zero to over 10,000 workers from 2007 to now," he said.

"We’ll have between 10,000 and 15,000 guest workers, so that makes up about 20% of the seasonal workers that we need in the state for that critical period from June 1 to November 1."

The WAFLA head said the stranded workers' hotel and food costs had been paid for by the association, which is paid by Washington growers to provide legal workers with all the relevant documents to the farms.

The growers also pay for the farmworkers' housing during their time in the U.S. along with all the associated travel costs, Fazio said.

"They’ve invested over US$50 million in the housing for the workers, and every year it costs them about US$15 million to get them here and back, not even counting the cost of the housing or the cost of buses to get them from the housing to the fields," Fazio said.

"Growers on the West Coast are all in for the legal worker program, and the workers love it because it’s just a beautiful system for them, but we have to ask the government to show us that it is committed."

He added the biggest cost this year had come in terms of lost fruit and productivity for some Washington growers whose guest workers were late arriving, but he didn't believe the incident had caused widespread problems.

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