Farmers speak out against immigration bill – Live, Local, Late Breaking news, weather, and sports.
TY TY, GA (WALB) – South Georgia produce farmers are speaking out against Georgia’s new immigration law.
It doesn’t officially take effect until next month, but it’s already causing a farm worker shortage that could cost the state tens of millions of dollars.
Farmers say migrant workers they depend on, even those in the country legally, are avoiding Georgia.
At Docia Farms in Ty Ty, a high dollar operation is underway for the next 8 weeks. One cantaloupe at a time, 2 million sweet melons will cross a conveyor belt en route to grocery stores across the country. But this operation, and others like it, could soon be no more.
“I could lose $50,000 to $60,000 a day if I don’t get stuff out. I’m just one of a lot of farmers around,” said Phillip Grimes.
Grimes has until July to get the cantaloupes out of the ground and off for sale. Help, however, is short, very short.
“In this heat that we got , if you don’t pick them everyday you lose them. And with this shortage of labor we may could lose some of them very easily,” Grimes said.
When Georgia lawmakers passed the new immigration law this year, farmers say migrant workers left the state. The exodus, some say, is crippling the produce industry.
“And even next year what are we going to do? Do we need to go grow produce? If we can’t get no body to pick it, we can’t grow it,” said Grimes.
Just a few miles down the road from Docia Farms, Ronald Barksdale’s small farming operation has hit a snag.
“We’ve already by passed acres that we couldn’t harvest,” he said.
Barksdale has been growing produce in Tift County since the sixties. Decades spent in the fields, he’s never seen the migrant labor force this hard up. And it’s costing him tens of thousands of dollars.
“We’ve bypassed pickles and cucumbers. We’ve got cabbage that we couldn’t get cut. It’s hurting,” he said.
What he and other farmers want people to know is that is if their crop production isn’t fully harvested, or they decided to not replant crops next year, the hurt will be felt by the consumer.
“Somewhere down the line it’s going to hit the consumer,” said Barksdale.
Now he and other farmers may turn to less labor intensive farming like cotton and corn.
It’s the same story for Ricky Tawzer of Sweet Dixie Melon. His watermelon fields are ripe for the picking, but he’s short about forty workers.
He said, “I get people calling me everyday. Other farmers hunting help. They’re short, you know?”
While everyone he employs is documented, Tawzer admits even some migrant workers here legally are leaving the state.
“They’re just worried because of the bill that was passed. They’re bypassing Georgia and going to other states,” he said.
With Georgia’s produce – crops like watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, and onions – bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars annually – a cease in production could in turn cost the state millions.
“We’ve got a million dollar crop out there and everyday that we don’t gather, it could add up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Tawzer
But what was enacted as one of the country’s toughest immigration laws, farmers agree some changes must be made, and soon.
“We need some kind of guest worker program that works for the small grower,” said Grimes.
“I’m taking a gamble in producing and selling them. But it’s another thing to not even get them harvested. It’s a risk I can’t take,” Barksdale said.
The farmers say despite the high unemployment rate, they can’t find enough local workers to do the job.
The Governor and State Ag Commissioner are asking farmers to fill out an online survey as they try to assess the extent of the worker shortage.
Georgia in 2011 enacted a law authorizing police to demand “papers” demonstrating citizenship or immigration status during traffic stops, criminalizes Georgians who interact with undocumented individuals, and makes it unjustifiably difficult for individuals without specific identification documents to access state facilities and services. The law was inspired by Arizona’s notorious SB 1070, which has already been blocked by courts.
The SPLC joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Asian Law Caucus in filing a class action lawsuit challenging the law on constitutional grounds.
The lawsuit charges that the extreme law endangers public safety, invites the racial profiling of Latinos, Asians and others who appear foreign to an officer, and interferes with federal law. The lawsuit asserts that the new law is unconstitutional because it interferes with federal authority over immigration matters in violation of the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution; authorizes and requires unreasonable seizures and arrests in violation of the Fourth Amendment; restricts the constitutional right to travel freely throughout the United States; and violates the equal protection and due process clauses of the Constitution by unlawfully discriminating against people who hold certain kinds of identity documents.
It was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on behalf of civil rights, labor, social justice and faith-based organizations, including the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Service Employees International Union, the Southern Regional Joint Board of Workers United, Alterna, the Coalition of Latino Leaders, the Task Force for the Homeless, DreamActivist.org, Instituto de Mexico, the Coalition for the People’s Agenda, the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center, individually named plaintiffs who would be subject to harassment or arrest under the law, and a class of similarly situated people.
Georgia is the third state to have enacted laws emulating Arizona’s controversial and costly bill. The laws in the other two states, Utah and Indiana, are currently facing legal challenges as well.