is very vocal he runs a large harvesting company and he has said to me and i am sure he has said to tom hey you dont have to worry about clean water you dont have to worry about clean air you dont have to worry about food safety because you are not going to have laborers and workers to harvest the product when it needs to be harvested this is huge in fact we annually survey our membership on the issues of most concern to them and farm labor availability just standing on its own ranks number two or three and just this specific issue so yes we have to have a temporary guest worker program we need agjobs but agriculture needs it we employ people that perform work that american citizens just will not do they have refused despite opportunities to engage in that kind of work and they wont do it so we absolutely need a temporary guest worker program here if we dont get it and we have got everify we are really in trouble mister farr so e verify without immigration reform is going to do you under mister bogart yes it would have dire consequences mister groot i think one of the things that you need to consider here too is that that workforce that will be legal and available will be under an inflationary situation because growers are going to compete for those workers and whoever pays the highest wage is going to get that legal worker so you are going to see rapid wage inflation also which adds to the cost of the product chairman issa you know today it was all very the news before i came to the hearing this morning that mcdonalds is going to hire fifty thousand people most of whom will make eight dollars thirty five cents an hour are we to presume that you could compete favorably against mcdonalds assuming somebody wanted to work so and a couple years after that we had the saw worker program and i really thought the country was kind of going in the right direction because previously i heard in my dad and my grandfathers past about these immigration country is really starting to get on the right track here feeling more legitimate and that kind of faded away and most of the workers that we worked at gracelita sign up went into other industry within a couple  providing and growing the food for this country and we really need to look at that in a very serious manner of legitimizing the american farmer because if e verify did hit without us here if i heard you right one of the challenges is in three years they would move on to other jobs or five years one of the real challenges for agriculture particularly the specialty crops where they are highly labor intensive not highly automated  like tomatoes strawberries and the like is basically what you need is a workforce that will choose to do that and that workforce disproportionately lies to our south these are places in which those jobs are very desirable they will come here issa where do you get your next generation of people to perform these jobs and that is really one of the challenges sam came twenty years ago i came ten years ago what can the federal government give you in the way of relief that would take care of this problem on an ongoing basis and not a one time as we did in one thousand nine hundred and eighty six that was fully ready to be another one time by the early s mister smith it is not unlike the discussion we were having about environmental issues there is some science there and there are some facts in the labor deal and i would disagree with jim just a little bit and say that it is not that people in our culture wont do this job is that people in our economy dont have to and so what drives people to come from mexico or central america to work in our agricultural areas is the opportunity it is economic and here their kids are going to college they are not going to come back and be farm workers they have come to the land of opportunity they have experienced the american dream and certainly not all of them but  so that you continue to need to have people who see that there is an economic opportunity agjobs i mean the thing that fascinated me about that is you had the far right and the far left and ufw and farm bureau in one room just what was saying bring everybody into one room and work out something that everybody can live with we havent agjobs that to me is the kind of thing we have been trying to figure out all about how to do things with epa how to do things with government we have a labor solution which is a license to be here and go home and you contribute to the american economy you support our ag prevailing wage because i want to leave that decision for later could not remain here permanently must go home at least annually must renew their ability to come back year after year and had no inherent pathway to citizenship in the basic bill if sam and i were to author that as an agjobs bill with those basic provisions what percentage of your problem would that kind of a system take care of ten percent fifty percent ninety percent ninety nine percent and we will presume for a moment that nobody has opted out of it to a certain extent because this is one of my passions if someone has been here under a broken system and they are willing to go into a fixed system we should not say no we got to go get some third party that has never been here so we will presume for a moment we are talking in many cases about the same workforce that e verify stands looming in front of  ha unfortunately and now card check here in california certainly something like that would work for agriculture the problem has always been how do you get both sides of the aisle to agree on a solution we got the ufw to agree agjobs or they got us to agree because we all gave a little bit what the ufw wanted was a pathway to citizenship and what we wanted was some other protections because we needed the workforce whether they had a path to citizenship or not that is a completely different  separate issue but assuming that a bill like yours could pass that would solve most of our problems for our workforce but the thing we need to make sure everybody understands and i have been preaching this for a long time is agriculture is for secure borders we are for workplace enforcement we are for employer sanctions we are for e verify all we ask is that before you implement something like  for the house of representatives to push an everify bill for every industry with no understanding or desire to understand that agriculture is completely different we are only ten percent  probably all the illegals in the country and everybody thinks it is all ag well ninety percent of it is all these other industries that use these illegal laborers all ag wants to do is just to take into consideration the fact that we ask unemployed americans to do the work and we dont get any response from unemployed americans so the law provides us the ability to go out and get foreign but then you take that law the ha that we have and you have the department of labor which has no desire to see that a successful program and wants to make it as difficult as possible for us to get these people who are refusing ha applications in record numbers and trying to make it expensive then the only federal solution we now we have doesnt work and now we are looking at an e verify on a national basis that will destroy agriculture our farmers will go abroad there is no question about it we are already doing th going to many foreign countries and producing so all of that takes jobs away from this economy and instead of producing the multiplier effect of maybe two to three jobs for every farm worker job in this country they are going elsewhere and producing two to three jobs in a foreign economy   probably one of the largest in the country if not the largest who said that eighty percent of his avocados were grown in california and twenty percent abroad and now twenty percent of them are grown in california and eighty percent of them are grown abroad now this doesnt mean that there arent problems trying to farm in mexico because they have labor problems too labor unions and families who will shut down a complete operation if they have a wedding to go to things you might not have happen hearing it only gives us about two percent because it is so difficult and so expensive and because of the requirement for housing if you reformed ha in a meaningful way it would still be difficult to get the workers because it is awfully difficult to run all of those people through consulates in mexico and to try and get all of that done and get people here there is a much simpler way to do it through a guest worker program and as you know the union doesnt want the ha to w had this guest worker program that brought in over one hundred thousand people a year to pick strawberries the interesting thing though i just had some spanish visitors come visit me with the unemployment rate so high in spain and especially in some of these towns they say up to thirty percent unemployment fifteen to thirty percent unemployment things have changed again and the reason why it has changed is when poland got admitted into the eu now there is a legitimate way for those ladies now to go into the northern european countries and get jobs in different industries the strawberry picking has become not as desirable again or the jobs have not become desirable unemployment maybe thirty percent for people to actually start to filter back in to agree to start picking strawberries again for the spanish guys that have relayed this to me they go wow it took that much bring in the guest workers to pick these perishable crops we cannot engage in something that maybe you are going to be having thirty to forty people successfully apply and entered into a program in a couple months agriculture doesnt work that way i mean nature sets our deadlines and when we are going we are going and if you dont the crops are rotting in the field so it has to be new eastern european members is you have essentially a mexico economy that is now part not completely but part of it so there is a natural economic migration that goes on and just like i think you said  earlier those people do not come to spain for the most part to stay in spain or even to ireland they come in order to earn money they save at a higher rate and they are part of why eastern europe is also seeing a huge amount of investment with people that have earn overseas and now are investing in their home countries this is one of our problems we have done a very good job in our fifty states so there is no such equivalent our equivalent is not part of the united states but in fact guatemala mexico ecuador a number of other countries and economic refugees that we all see on our streets every day mister murai now you will see in spain if you travel there recently the agricultural workforce is made up of many migrants from northern africa since the eastern european countries have joined the community chairman issa sam other closing comments here mister farr i think you are hearing a purpose am concerned about is these laws that we have created not only we the federal government and all of the regulatory process that comes out that but the state government and even local government if we are going to just gut the e like mad without being careful about how you approach it and i know your party has been really the leadership has been lets sort of gut the epa you are never going to be able to reach a i went to the agency and there was nobody there the doors were locked nobody answered the phone i couldn't get my permit so that is why this process and you are having these oversight hearings has got to look into this stuff i hate bureaucracy to the bottom of the problem here and i think that you have heard that it is going to take some bold leadership to require i like the idea of having maybe a one stop in the federal regulatory here i expect that seventy percent of the workforce here is not properly documented but that is a workforce that also has kids in school that is a workforce that also spends their money in this community and tries to find housing in  this community so it is a big social issue and to have that much of your workforce kind of living in a dark cloud of fear that at any moment you may be deported just is a bad way to operate lot sam in closing we are the oversight space space and reform committee and although our oversight includes a huge amount of investigations at any given time probably thirty investigations of misconduct waste fraud and abuse in government it is in fact the reform portion of our mandate that brought us here today we wanted to listen to you about not only problems you face but also how you view the possibilities of reform we are not here to write legislation our committee has an interesting jurisdiction we can look at it all we can write it all we get what they call sequential referral but in almost every case when we do big reform are writing reform that a number of other committees have to process through so i want to thank you all for your input your record you helped make here today is part of how we make the justification for reforms we suggest that other committees wri or that in fact our committee initiates and then goes through the process i want to thank congressman farr because when it comes to finding an agjobs program that works and getting through what is a somewhat failed process post epa determining that it must start it has to be done with leaders like congressman farr so i appreciate your being here and i feel very welcome i will let your classmate and my