Article snippet: The “Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019” amnesty would create two huge streams of low-wage labor for farm companies and likely for meatpackers and other agricultural employers. One stream would be from the population of one million existing farmworker illegal aliens who will be amnestied and redefined as “Certified Agricultural Workers” so they can get green cards and citizenship after several years — regardless of the “public charge” rule which bars welfare-reliant migrants from citizenship. The second stream would come from illegal aliens who sign up to be legal H-2A visa farmworkers and from a treasure box of 40,000 green cards per year for employers to pay their lower-wage H-2A workers. The bill also changes the existing H-2A farmworker visa program by setting a 3.25 percent cap on annual wage growth and by allowing some H-2A workers to work year-round for dairies or non-agriculture companies. The “modernization act” will preserve the pre-modern, lower-tech, lower-productivity sectors in the agricultural economy by allowing dairy, fruit, and berry companies to avoid investment in labor-saving, productivity-boosting machinery. The amnesty legislation will likely be welcomed by progressives even though it will cut the marketplace wages for Americans and for H-2A farmworkers and will also reduce the economic incentives for investing in new labor-saving machinery or techniques, such as vertical farms. But the amnesty side of the bill would help Democrats by... Link to the full article to read more