2014 ndi 6ws – Fitzmier, Lundberg, Abelkop

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IMPACTS

CIR

Legal Status Will Pass

There is already common ground on path to legal status

JS, 6/30 – (“In the Spotlight: Pass a consensus immigration bill before summer’s end”, Journal Star, 6/30/14, http://www.pjstar.com/article/20140630/OPINION/140629183/10950/OPINION)//EX

The two biggest disagreements remaining concern what the pathway to citizenship should look like and the degree of border security. But common ground already exists on a path to legal status. Can we not at least pass this summer the policies on which both parties agree? One creative solution could yet bring action. There is a bipartisan group of House lawmakers who support a reform to the House rules that would allow members to bypass leadership and bring a measure to the floor by majority vote. If this rule change were proposed and approved, House members could conceivably bring whatever immigration measure the Judiciary Committee approves to the House floor for a vote. A rules change is doing things the hard way, though it may be just the prescription needed for such a gridlocked Congress. Alternatively, Illinois Republicans Adam Kingzinger and Aaron Schock both recently gave impassioned presentations on their support for immigration reform at a Chicago rally in April. If they, or other Illinois Republican House members, are prepared to lead an effort to pass immigration reform yet this summer, please act now. August is coming.

GOP agrees on path to legal status

Fox, 14 – (“House GOP leaders back limited path to legal status for illegal immigrants”, Fox News Politics, 1/30/14, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/30/house-gop-leaders-back-limited-path-to-legal-status-for-illegal-immigrants/)//EX

House Republican leaders on Thursday endorsed a limited path to legal status for some illegal immigrants, in a move Democrats said could open the door to a deal on comprehensive immigration legislation. The position was included in a document released by party leaders during their annual retreat in Maryland. The "standards for immigration reform" document ruled out a special path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Instead, it said immigrants living here illegally could remain and live legally if they pass background checks, pay fines and back taxes, learn to speak English and understand U.S. civics, and can support themselves without access to welfare. But GOP leaders made clear that border security must be improved first. "None of this can happen before specific enforcement triggers have been implemented," the document said. Nevertheless, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a big advocate for immigration legislation on the Senate side, said the announcement could smooth the way for a deal on legislation. The Senate passed an immigration bill last year. "While these standards are certainly not everything we would agree with, they leave a real possibility that Democrats and Republicans, in both the House and Senate, can in some way come together and pass immigration reform that both sides can accept. It is a long, hard road but the door is open," he said. The House GOP document is sure to meet resistance from some rank-and-file members, and skeptical Republicans on the Senate side.

Economy

Econ

Path to legal status is key to the economy

Beadle, 12 – B.A. in journalism and Spanish from the University of Alabama (Amanda, “Top 10 Reasons Why The U.S. Needs Comprehensive Immigration Reform”, Think Progress, 12/10/12, http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/10/1307561/top-10-reasons-why-the-us-needs-comprehensive-immigration-reform-that-includes-a-path-to-citizenship/)//EX

8. Young undocumented immigrants would add billions to the economy if they gained legal status. Passing the DREAM Act—legislation that proposes to create a roadmap to citizenship for immigrants who came to the United States as children—would put 2.1 million young people on a pathway to legal status, adding $329 billion to the American economy over the next two decades. 9. And DREAMers would boost employment and wages. Legal status and the pursuit of higher education would create an aggregate 19 percent increase in earnings for young undocumented immigrants who would benefit from the DREAM Act by 2030. The ripple effects of these increased wages would create $181 billion in induced economic impact, 1.4 million new jobs, and $10 billion in increased federal revenue. 10. Significant reform of the high-skilled immigration system would benefit certain industries that require high-skilled workers. Immigrants make up 23 percent of the labor force in high-tech manufacturing and information technology industries, and immigrants more highly educated, on average, than the native-born Americans working in these industries. For every immigrant who earns an advanced degree in one of these fields at a U.S. university, 2.62 American jobs are created.

Agriculture

Ag---1NC

Path to legal status is key to agriculture – work force

Fatka, 7/4 – graduated from Iowa State University and staff editor at a sister publication, Feedstuffs (Jacqui, “Immigration Impasse Impact Troublesome for Ag”, Farm Progress, 7/4/14, http://farmfutures.com/blogs-immigration-impasse-impact-troublesome-ag-8696)//EX

Jim Mulhern, president and chief executive officer at the National Milk Producers Federation, voiced frustration that partisan politics couldn’t be put aside to address the current dysfunctional immigration system. “The irony is that virtually everyone on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue admits the status quo is unacceptable; yet we seem destined to continue suffering from it, because common-sense reforms remain beyond our reach,” he said. Conner warned executive action will only freeze in place the current dysfunctional state of affairs. “Farmers will continue to be unable to find the workers they need to pick crops or care for livestock; more food production will go overseas; local economies across the country will suffer; and the American consumer will ultimately pay more for the food they eat,” he said. Agriculture needs a legal, skilled and dependable workforce, and the House’s inaction fails to provide it. I’ve heard House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, say repeatedly that Republicans need to help fix the problem. Even Obama conceded that he believes Boehner when he said he wants to pass an immigration bill. Obama tried to say he wasn’t giving up on working with House Republicans to deliver a more permanent solution. “If House Republicans are really concerned about me taking too many executive actions, the best solution to that is passing bills. Pass a bill; solve a problem. Don't just say no on something that everybody agrees needs to be done,” Obama challenged. “Because if we pass a bill, that will supplant whatever I’ve done administratively. We’ll have a structure there that works, and it will be permanent. And people can make plans and businesses can make plans based on the law.” For agriculture, it’s a matter of trying to continue to push for the right solution, or at least a feasible solution for the time being. United Fresh president and CEO Tom Stenzel said if the House continues to disregard its responsibility to address this issue, “the produce industry has no choice but to work with the Administration on short-term administrative patches that will be appreciated, but are ultimately unsatisfactory.” Mulhern said NMPF would look for solutions for finding year-round workers under the current agricultural-visa system which applies now only to seasonal workers. The Wall Street Journal reported that NMPF could try to alleviate farmers’ worries about government raids and deportations by urging for administration actions. Question is, will that only fuel further criticisms on the lack of deporting undocumented immigrants?

Increased farm labor Key to small farms

Gual 10

(Frank, Farm job, anyone?, Associated Content, p. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5877166/farm_job_anyone.html 10/17/10)

Those calling for tougher immigration laws and the UFW claim that farmers have become accustomed to hiring undocumented workers who are willing to work for little, and now make up half the farm labor force. Legal immigrants make up a quarter of the farm labor. Those Americans who do get hired to do farm work often disappear quickly.¶ Farm work is often offered in remote locations which city dwellers find difficult to get to, and one solution would be to provide transportation from central cities with high unemployment to outlying farms. Another possibility would be to use prisoners incarcerated for minor offenses.¶ A shortage of farm labor will cause food prices to rise at a time when many people are out of work and may be receiving government assistance. It will also increase our dependence on imported food, which may not be up to FDA standards and could cause health problems, as has already happened.¶ Another effect of the farm labor shortage will be the continued disappearance of small family farms, which will either be abandoned or bought by large conglomerates whose management is far removed from the local community.

Prevents extinction

Altieri 8

[Professor of agroecology @ University of California, Berkeley. [Miguel Altieri (President, Sociedad Cientifica LatinoAmericana de Agroecologia (SOCLA), “Small farms as a planetary ecological asset: Five key reasons why we should support the revitalization of small farms in the Global South,” Food First, Posted May 9th, 2008, pg. http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2115]

The Via Campesina has long argued that farmers need land to produce food for their own communities and for their country and for this reason has advocated for genuine agrarian reforms to access and control land, water, agrobiodiversity, etc, which are of central importance for communities to be able to meet growing food demands. The Via Campesina believes that in order to protect livelihoods, jobs, people's food security and health, as well as the environment, food production has to remain in the hands of small- scale sustainable farmers and cannot be left under the control of large agribusiness companies or supermarket chains. Only by changing the export-led, free-trade based, industrial agriculture model of large farms can the downward spiral of poverty, low wages, rural-urban migration, hunger and environmental degradation be halted. Social rural movements embrace the concept of food sovereignty as an alternative to the neo-liberal approach that puts its faith in inequitable international trade to solve the world’s food problem. Instead, food sovereignty focuses on local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles, energy and technological sovereignty and farmer to farmer networks.¶ This global movement, the Via Campesina, has recently brought their message to the North, partly to gain the support of foundations and consumers, as political pressure from a wealthier public that increasingly depends on unique food products from the South marketed via organic, fair trade, or slow food channels could marshal the sufficient political will to curb the expansion of biofuels, transgenic crops and agro-exports, and put an end to subsidies to industrial farming and dumping practices that hurt small farmers in the South. But can these arguments really captivate the attention and support of northern consumers and philanthropists? Or is there a need for a different argument—one that emphasizes that the very quality of life and food security of the populations in the North depends not only on the food products, but in the ecological services provided by small farms of the South. In fact, it is herein argued that the functions performed by small farming systems still prevalent in Africa, Asia and Latin America—in the post-peak oil era that humanity is entering—comprise an ecological asset for humankind and planetary survival. In fact, in an era of escalating fuel and food costs, climate change, environmental degradation, GMO pollution and corporate- dominated food systems, small, biodiverse, agroecologically managed farms in the Global South are the only viable form of agriculture that will feed the world under the new ecological and economic scenario.¶ There are at last five reasons why it is in the interest of Northern consumers to support the cause and struggle of small farmers in the South:¶ 1. Small farmers are key for the world’s food security¶ While 91% of the planet’s 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land are increasingly being devoted to agro-export crops, biofuels and transgenic soybean to feed cars and cattle, millions of small farmers in the Global South still produce the majority of staple crops needed to feed the planet’s rural and urban populations. In Latin America, about 17 million peasant production units occupying close to 60.5 million hectares, or 34.5% of the total cultivated land with average farm sizes of about 1.8 hectares, produce 51% of the maize, 77% of the beans, and 61% of the potatoes for domestic consumption. Africa has approximately 33 million small farms, representing 80 percent of all farms in the region. Despite the fact that Africa now imports huge amounts of cereals, the majority of African farmers (many of them women) who are smallholders with farms below 2 hectares, produce a significant amount of basic food crops with virtually no or little use of fertilizers and improved seed. In Asia, the majority of more than 200 million rice farmers, few farm more than 2 hectares of rice make up the bulk of the rice produced by Asian small farmers. Small increases in yields on these small farms that produce most of the world´s staple crops will have far more impact on food availability at the local and regional levels, than the doubtful increases predicted for distant and corporate-controlled large monocultures managed with such high tech solutions as genetically modified seeds.¶ 2.Small farms are more productive and resource conserving than large-scale monocultures¶ Although the conventional wisdom is that small family farms are backward and unproductive, research shows that small farms are much more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop. Integrated farming systems in which the small-scale farmer produces grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products out-produce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms. A large farm may produce more corn per hectare than a small farm in which the corn is grown as part of a polyculture that also includes beans, squash, potato, and fodder. In polycultures developed by smallholders, productivity, in terms of harvestable products, per unit area is higher than under sole cropping with the same level of management. Yield advantages range from 20 percent to 60 percent, because polycultures reduce losses due to weeds, insects and diseases, and make more efficient use of the available resources of water, light and nutrients. In overall output, the diversified farm produces much more food, even if measured in dollars. In the USA, data shows that the smallest two hectare farms produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about $2,902 per acre. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249 per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare. Not only do small to medium sized farms exhibit higher yields than conventional farms, but do so with much lower negative impact on the environment. Small farms are ‘multi-functional’– more productive, more efficient, and contribute more to economic development than do large farms. Communities surrounded by many small farms have healthier economies than do communities surrounded by depopulated, large mechanized farms. Small farmers also take better care of natural resources, including reducing soil erosion and conserving biodiversity.¶ The inverse relationship between farm size and output can be attributed to the more efficient use of land, water, biodiversity and other agricultural resources by small farmers. So in terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would be better off with small-scale farmers. Building strong rural economies in the Global South based on productive small-scale farming will allow the people of the South to remain with their families and will help to stem the tide of migration. And as population continues to grow and the amount of farmland and water available to each person continues to shrink, a small farm structure may become central to feeding the planet, especially when large- scale agriculture devotes itself to feeding car tanks.¶ 3. Small traditional and biodiverse farms are models of sustainability¶ Despite the onslaught of industrial farming, the persistence of thousands of hectares under traditional agricultural management documents a successful indigenous agricultural strategy of adaptability and resiliency. These microcosms of traditional agriculture that have stood the test of time, and that can still be found almost untouched since 4 thousand years in the Andes, MesoAmerica, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, offer promising models of sustainability as they promote biodiversity, thrive without agrochemicals, and sustain year-round yields even under marginal environmental conditions. The local knowledge accumulated during millennia and the forms of agriculture and agrobiodiversity that this wisdom has nurtured, comprise a Neolithic legacy embedded with ecological and cultural resources of fundamental value for the future of humankind.¶ Recent research suggests that many small farmers cope and even prepare for climate change, minimizing crop failure through increased use of drought tolerant local varieties, water harvesting, mixed cropping, opportunistic weeding, agroforestry and a series of other traditional techniques. Surveys conducted in hillsides after Hurricane Mitch in Central America showed that farmers using sustainable practices such as “mucuna” cover crops, intercropping, and agroforestry suffered less “damage” than their conventional neighbors. The study spanning 360 communities and 24 departments in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala showed that diversified plots had 20% to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture, less erosion, and experienced lower economic losses than their conventional neighbors.¶ This demonstrates that a re-evaluation of indigenous technology can serve as a key source of information on adaptive capacity and resilient capabilities exhibited by small farms—features of strategic importance for world farmers to cope with climatic change. In addition, indigenous technologies often reflect a worldview and an understanding of our relationship to the natural world that is more realistic and more sustainable that those of our Western European heritage.¶ 4. Small farms represent a sanctuary of GMO-free agrobiodiversity¶ In general, traditional small scale farmers grow a wide variety of cultivars . Many of these plants are landraces grown from seed passed down from generation to generation, more genetically heterogeneous than modern cultivars, and thus offering greater defenses against vulnerability and enhancing harvest security in the midst of diseases, pests, droughts and other stresses. In a worldwide survey of crop varietal diversity on farms involving 27 crops, scientists found that considerable crop genetic diversity continues to be maintained on farms in the form of traditional crop varieties, especially of major staple crops. In most cases, farmers maintain diversity as an insurance to meet future environmental change or social and economic needs. Many researchers have concluded that this varietal richness enhances productivity and reduces yield variability. For example, studies by plant pathologists provide evidence that mixing of crop species and or varieties can delay the onset of diseases by reducing the spread of disease carrying spores, and by modifying environmental conditions so that they are less favorable to the spread of certain pathogens. Recent research in China, where four different mixtures of rice varieties grown by farmers from fifteen different townships over 3000 hectares, suffered 44% less blast incidence and exhibited 89% greater yield than homogeneous fields without the need to use chemicals.¶ It is possible that traits important to indigenous farmers (resistance to drought, competitive ability, performance on intercrops, storage quality, etc) could be traded for transgenic qualities which may not be important to farmers (Jordan, 2001). Under this scenario, risk could increase and farmers would lose their ability to adapt to changing biophysical environments and increase their success with relatively stable yields with a minimum of external inputs while supporting their communities’ food security.¶ Although there is a high probability that the introduction of transgenic crops will enter centers of genetic diversity, it is crucial to protect areas of peasant agriculture free of contamination from GMO crops, as traits important to indigenous farmers (resistance to drought, food or fodder quality, maturity, competitive ability, performance on intercrops, storage quality, taste or cooking properties, compatibility with household labor conditions, etc) could be traded for transgenic qualities (i.e. herbicide resistance) which are of no importance to farmers who don’t use agrochemicals . Under this scenario risk will increase and farmers will lose their ability to produce relatively stable yields with a minimum of external inputs under changing biophysical environments. The social impacts of local crop shortfalls, resulting from changes in the genetic integrity of local varieties due to genetic pollution, can be considerable in the margins of the Global South.¶ Maintaining pools of genetic diversity, geographically isolated from any possibility of cross fertilization or genetic pollution from uniform transgenic crops will create “islands” of intact germplasm which will act as extant safeguards against potential ecological failure derived from the second green revolution increasingly being imposed with programs such as the Gates-Rockefeller AGRA in Africa. These genetic sanctuary islands will serve as the only source of GMO-free seeds that will be needed to repopulate the organic farms in the North inevitably contaminated by the advance of transgenic agriculture. The small farmers and indigenous communities of the Global South, with the help of scientists and NGOs, can continue to create and guard biological and genetic diversity that has enriched the food culture of the whole planet.¶ 5. Small farms cool the climate¶ While industrial agriculture contributes directly to climate change through no less than one third of total emissions of the major greenhouse gases — Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), small, biodiverse organic farms have the opposite effect by sequestering more carbon in soils. Small farmers usually treat their soils with organic compost materials that absorb and sequester carbon better than soils that are farmed with conventional fertilizers. Researchers have suggested that the conversion of 10,000 small- to medium-sized farms to organic production would store carbon in the soil equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road.¶ Further climate amelioration contributions by small farms accrue from the fact that most use significantly less fossil fuel in comparison to conventional agriculture mainly due to a reduction of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, relying instead on organic manures, legume-based rotations, and diversity schemes to enhance beneficial insects. Farmers who live in rural communities near cities and towns and are linked to local markets, avoid the energy wasted and the gas emissions associated with transporting food hundreds and even thousands of miles.¶ Conclusions¶ The great advantage of small farming systems is their high levels of agrobidoversity arranged in the form of variety mixtures, polycultures, crop-livestock combinations and/or agroforestry patterns. Modeling new agroecosystems using such diversified designs are extremely valuable to farmers whose systems are collapsing due to debt, pesticide use, transgenic treadmills, or climate change. Such diverse systems buffer against natural or human-induced variations in production conditions. There is much to learn from indigenous modes of production, as these systems have a strong ecological basis, maintain valuable genetic diversity, and lead to regeneration and preservation of biodiversity and natural resources. Traditional methods are particularly instructive because they provide a long-term perspective on successful agricultural management under conditions of climatic variability.¶ Organized social rural movements in the Global South oppose industrial agriculture in all its manifestations, and increasingly their territories constitute isolated areas rich in unique agrobiodiversity, including genetically diverse material, therefore acting as extant safeguards against the potential ecological failure derived from inappropriate agricultural modernization schemes. It is precisely the ability to generate and maintain diverse crop genetic resources that offer “unique” niche possibilities to small farmers that cannot be replicated by farmers in the North who are condemned to uniform cultivars and to co-exist with GMOs. The “ cibo pulito, justo e buono” that Slow Food promotes, the Fair Trade coffee, bananas, and the organic products so much in demand by northern consumers can only be produced in the agroecological islands of the South. This “difference” inherent to traditional systems, can be strategically utilized to revitalize small farming communities by exploiting opportunities that exist for linking traditional agrobiodiversity with local/national/international markets, as long as these activities are justly compensated by the North and all the segments of the market remain under grassroots control.¶ Consumers of the North can play a major role by supporting these more equitable markets which do not perpetuate the colonial model of “agriculture of the poor for the rich,” but rather a model that promotes small biodiverse farms as the basis for strong rural economies in the Global South. Such economies will not only provide sustainable production of healthy, agroecologically-produced, accessible food for all, but will allow indigenous peoples and small farmers to continue their millennial work of building and conserving the agricultural and natural biodiversity on which we all depend now and even more so in the future.

Reform K2 Agriculture

Immigration key to agriculture

Antoine Abou-Diwan 1/28/13, “Bipartisan immigration proposal acknowledges agriculture's needs”, Imperial Valley Press

Bipartisan immigration proposal acknowledges agriculture's needs¶The bipartisan proposal unveiled Monday paves the way to legalization of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants with a program described as “tough but fair.”¶It also addresses the concerns of the agricultural industry, whose labor pool by some estimates is composed of some 50 to 70 percent unauthorized workers.¶“Agricultural workers who commit to the long-term stability of our nation’s agricultural industries will be treated differently than the rest of the undocumented population because of the role they play inensuring that Americans have safe and secure agricultural products to sell and consume,” states the proposal.¶Total farmworkers in Imperial County fluctuated between 8,000 and 11,000 in 2012, according to data from the Employment Development Department.¶“There’s definitely recognition that agriculture will be taken care of,” said Steve Scaroni, a Heber farmer who has lobbied Washington extensively on immigration reform.¶The proposalis based on four broad principles: a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, reform of the system to capitalize on characteristics that strengthen the economy, the creation of an effective employment verification system and improving the immigration process forfuture workers.¶The principles are broad and many details need to be worked out.¶“The principles acknowledge that the situation in agriculture is distinct and requires different treatment,” said Craig Regelbrugge, chairman of the Agricultural Coalition for Immigration Reform, a group that represents the landscape and nursery industry.¶Access to a legal and stable work force is vital, Regelbrugge said, as is a workable program that eliminates or reduces hurdles for a future work force.¶“We would like to see the agriculture legalization program attractive so there are incentives for them to work in the sector,” Regelbrugge noted.¶The proposals also acknowledge that the United States immigration system is broken, and address criticism that not enough is being done to enforce existing immigration laws. To that end, Monday’s proposals are contingent on secure borders.¶But, the acknowledgement of the agriculture sector’s needs allows for some optimism.¶“As long as the labor supply solutions are there, we can support the enforcement solutions,” Regelbrugge said.

Guest worker visas are key to the ag industry labor pool

Rohrlich 10, 5/4/2010 (Justin - head writer for World in Review, Immigration reform a thorn in agricultural industry’s side, Minyanville, p. http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/immigration-arizona-agriculture-industry-foreign-labor/5/4/2010/id/28109)

A few years ago, the American Farm Bureau Federation reported that the lack of a viable guest worker program could cut annual farm revenues by approximately $9 billion.¶Bob Stallman, president of the federation, wrote, “Of all major sectors of the US economy, agriculture is the most dependent on a migrant labor force.” ¶He added, “Agriculture would face dire consequences if we were to lose our guest labor workforce. Would you prefer to eat food produced on American soil by migrant workers, or would you rather eat food produced on foreign soil by the same workers?”¶Farmers are dependent on the migrant workforce. "We need them to milk cows or we'd barely be in business," Cochrane, Wisconsin dairy farmer Loren Wolfe told the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. ¶ Guest workers who enter the United States on H2 visas are allowed to remain in the country for up to 10 months and pick the tomatoes that are made into the Heinz (HNZ) ketchup we buy at Walmart (WMT), process the milk used in McDonald’s (MCD) shakes, pick the lettuce with which Burger King (BKC) tops its Whoppers, and sort the strawberries the J.M. Smucker Co. (SJM) turns into jam.¶ The Arizona law won’t impact workers who are in the US legally under an H2 visa, but the farm industry is concerned that the increased scrutiny on immigration will impede their efforts to get the H2 program expanded. And the law could make it even more difficult to find labor.¶ “The H2 program achieves the goal of providing a sufficient workforce for growers,” Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, tells Minyanville. “It helps the industry as a whole, stabilizing the workforce, and removes the risk of having your workforce disrupted at a critical period in the growing season.You may have only a few days to work with, and a farmer can’t risk having half his workforce being taken away by Immigration just like that.” ¶The bureaucracy standing between growers and much-needed labor can be daunting. To help navigate the red tape, companies have sprouted up to act as employment agents that have satellite offices in Mexico, where they help people obtain H2 visas, then help match employers with legal, H2-holding workers who are bused up to the States for a maximum period of ten months.¶ Bob Wingfield, who is president of one such agency, Dallas-based Amigos Labor Solutions, tells Minyanville that Americans don’t want the jobs these guest workers have. “It’s a fallacy that guest workers are sucking the system dry,” he says.¶ Far from sucking the system dry, there actually aren’t enough of them. In 2006, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crops in Texas, Michigan, and California rotted in the fields because there were simply too few hands available.

Now’s key --- immigration flows are net zero --- farmers cannot find the employees necessary to sustain their sector

Boston Globe12, “Immigration reform is good for business,” 10-21-12, http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2012/10/20/immigration-reform-good-for-business/1zjj2uQXy0cT80EKLwgilL/story.html

For hardliners who refuse to consider a guest worker program for illegal immigrants, a moment of truth may be approaching. If undocumented workers are truly taking jobs that would otherwise go to Americans, then unskilled workers should be flocking to the fields of states like Arizona and Alabama, which have instituted draconian crackdowns on illegal immigrants.¶ Alas, it isn’t happening. The American Farm Bureau Federation recently estimated that labor shortages from state crackdowns on illegal immigration are costing the economy between $5 billion and $9 billion.In some states, farms are heavily dependant on undocumented labor both to plant and harvest crops. Now, they simply do not have the bodies to work the fields.¶Not all of these shortages are due to state laws targeting illegal immigration; the weak US economy and improved opportunities in Mexico have also led to a dwindling of undocumented workers. These factors, combined with tougher border enforcement, have squeezed the net flow of Mexicans coming into the United States to zero.¶This is mostly good news. The border-control problem is getting better. And employers who’ve taken advantage of cheap illegal labor have no grounds to claim injury now that they can’t find people to pick their crops. But if employers literally cannot recruit enough documented workers to do these jobs, after agreeing to pay the minimum wage, one argument against a guest-worker program has disappeared.

Immigration reform is key to food security

ACIR ‘7 (December 4, 2007 THE AGRICULTURE COALITION FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM )

Dear Member of Congress: The Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform (ACIR) is deeply concerned with pending immigration enforcement legislation known as the ‘Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007' or ‘SAVE Act’ (H.R.4088 and S.2368). While these bills seek to address the worthy goal of stricter immigration law enforcement, they fail to take a comprehensive approach to solving the immigration problem. History shows that a one dimensional approach to the nation’s immigration problem is doomed to fail. Enforcement alone, without providing a viable means to obtain a legal workforce to sustain economic growth is a formula for disaster. Agriculture best illustrates this point. Agricultural industries that need considerable labor in order to function include the fruit and vegetable, dairy and livestock, nursery, greenhouse, and Christmas tree sectors. Localized labor shortages have resulted in actual crop loss in various parts of the country. More broadly, producers are making decisions to scale back production, limit expansion, and leave many critical tasks unfulfilled.Continued labor shortages could force more producers to shift production out of the U.S., thus stressing already taxed food and import safety systems. Farm lenders are becoming increasingly concerned about the stability of affected industries. This problem is aggravated by the nearly universal acknowledgement that the current H-2A agricultural guest worker program does not work. Based on government statistics and other evidence, roughly 80 percent of the farm labor force in the United States is foreign born, and a significant majority of that labor force is believed to be improperly authorized. The bills’ imposition of mandatory electronic employment eligibility verification will screen out the farm labor force without providing access to legal workers. Careful study of farm labor force demographics and trends indicates that there is not a replacement domestic workforce available to fill these jobs. This feature alone will result in chaos unless combined with labor-stabilizing reforms. Continued failure by Congress to act to address this situation in a comprehensive fashion is placing in jeopardy U.S. food security and global competitiveness. Furthermore, congressional inaction threatens the livelihoods of millions of Americans whose jobs exist because laborintensive agricultural production is occurring in America. If production is forced to move, most of the upstream and downstream jobs will disappear as well. The Coalition cannot defend of the broken status quo. We support well-managed borders and a rational legal system. We have worked for years to develop popular bipartisan legislation that would stabilize the existing experienced farm workforce and provide an orderly transition to wider reliance on a legal agricultural worker program that provides a fair balance of employer and employee rights and protections. We respectfully urge you to oppose S.2368, H.R.4088, or any other bills that would impose employment-based immigration enforcement in isolation from equally important reforms that would provide for a stable and legal farm labor force.

Ag---Ag Industry

Agriculture industry’s collapsing now---immigration’s key to solve

Alfonso Serrano 12, Bitter Harvest: U.S. Farmers Blame Billion-Dollar Losses on Immigration Laws, Time, 9-21-12, http://business.time.com/2012/09/21/bitter-harvest-u-s-farmers-blame-billion-dollar-losses-on-immigration-laws/

The Broetjes and an increasing number of farmers across the country say that a complex web of local and state anti-immigration laws account for acute labor shortages. With the harvest season in full bloom, stringent immigration laws have forced waves of undocumented immigrants to flee certain states for more-hospitable areas. In their wake, thousands of acres of crops have been left to rot in the fields, as farmers have struggled to compensate for labor shortages with domestic help.¶ “The enforcement of immigration policy has devastated the skilled-labor source that we’ve depended on for 20 or 30 years,” said Ralph Broetje during a recent teleconference organized by the National Immigration Forum, adding that last year Washington farmers — part of an $8 billion agriculture industry — were forced to leave 10% of their crops rotting on vines and trees. “It’s getting worse each year,” says Broetje, “and it’s going to end up putting some growers out of business if Congress doesn’t step up and do immigration reform.”¶ (MORE: Why Undocumented Workers Are Good for the Economy)¶Roughly 70% of the 1.2 million people employed by the agriculture industry are undocumented.No U.S. industry is more dependent on undocumented immigrants.But acute labor shortages brought on by anti-immigration measures threaten to heap record losses on an industry emerging from years of stiff foreign competition. Nationwide, labor shortages will result in losses of up to $9 billion, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Extinction

Lugar 2kChairman of the Senator Foreign Relations Committee and Member/Former Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee (Richard, a US Senator from Indiana, is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a member and former chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “calls for a new green revolution to combat global warming and reduce world instability,” pg online @ http://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/imgversn/143/lugar.html)

In a world confronted by global terrorism, turmoil in the Middle East, burgeoning nuclear threats and other crises, it is easy to lose sight of the long-range challenges. But we do so at our peril. One of the most daunting of them is meeting the world’s need for food and energy in this century. At stake is not only preventing starvation and saving the environment, but also world peace and security. History tells us that states may go to war over access to resources, and that poverty and famine have oftenbred fanaticism and terrorism. Working to feed the world will minimize factors that contribute to global instability and the proliferation of [WMDs] weapons of mass destruction. With the world population expected to grow from 6 billion people today to 9 billion by mid-century, the demand for affordable food will increasewell beyond currentinternational production levels. People in rapidly developing nations will have the means greatly to improve their standard of living and caloric intake. Inevitably, that means eating more meat. This will raise demand for feed grain at the same time that the growing world population will need vastly more basic food to eat. Complicating a solution to this problem is a dynamic that must be better understood in the West: developing countries often use limited arable land to expand cities to house their growing populations. As good land disappears, people destroy timber resources and even rainforests as they try to create more arable land to feed themselves. The long-term environmental consequences could be disastrous for the entire globe. Productivity revolution To meet the expected demand for food over the next 50 years, we in the United States will have to grow roughly three times more food on the land we have. That’s a tall order. My farm in Marion County, Indiana, for example, yields on average 8.3 to 8.6 tonnes of corn per hectare – typical for a farm in central Indiana. To triple our production by 2050, we will have to produce an annual average of 25 tonnes per hectare. Can we possibly boost output that much? Well, it’s been done before. Advances in the use of fertilizer and water, improved machinery and better tilling techniques combined to generate a threefold increase in yields since 1935 – on our farm back then, my dad produced 2.8 to 3 tonnes per hectare. Much US agriculture has seen similar increases. But of course there is no guarantee that we can achieve those results again. Given the urgency of expanding food production to meet world demand, we must invest much more in scientific research and target that money toward projects that promise to have significant national and global impact. For the United States, that will mean a major shift in the way we conduct and fund agricultural science. Fundamental research will generate the innovations that will be necessary to feed the world. The United States can take a leading position in a productivity revolution. And our success at increasing food production may play a decisive humanitarian role in the survival ofbillions of people and the health of our planet.

Ag---Food Insecurity

Food insecurity’s the greatest proximate cause of war

Brown ’11

For the Mayans, it was deforestation and soil erosion. As more and more land was cleared for farming to support the expanding empire, soil erosion undermined the productivity of their tropical soils. A team of scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has noted that the extensive land clearing by the Mayans likely also altered the regional climate, reducing rainfall. In effect, the scientists suggest, it was the convergence of several environmental trends, some reinforcing others, that led to the food shortages that brought down the Mayan civilization. 26 Although we live in a highly urbanized, technologically advanced society, we are as dependent on the earth’s natural support systems as the Sumerians and Mayans were. If we continue with business as usual, civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when. We now have an economy that is destroying its natural support systems, one that has put us on a decline and collapse path. We are dangerously close to the edge. Peter Goldmark, former Rockefeller Foundation president, puts it well: “The death of our civilization is no longer a theory or an academic possibility; it is the road we’re on.” 2 Judging by the archeological records of earlier civilizations, more often than not food shortages appear to have precipitated their decline and collapse. Given the advances of modern agriculture, I had long rejected the idea that food could be the weak link in our twenty-first century civilization. Today I think not only that it could be the weak link but that it is the weak link.

Ag---Protectionism

US food shortages cause protectionism

Pollan ‘8 (BOOKS ARTICLESAPPEARANCESMEDIA PRESS KITNEWSRESOURCES TODAY’S LINK Farmer in Chief By Michael Pollan The New York Times Magazine, October 12, 2008

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little — a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

Protectionism triggers nuclear war

Panzner 8—25-year veteran of the markets who has worked for for HSBC, Soros Funds, ABN Amro, Dresdner Bank, and J.P. Morgan Chase. New York Institute of Finance faculty member and a graduate of Columbia University. (Michael, Financial Armageddon, 136-8)

Continuing calls for curbs on the flow of finance and trade will inspire the United States and other nations to spew forth protectionist legislation like the notorious Smoot-Hawley bill. Introduced at the start of the Great Depression, it triggered a series of tit-for-tat economic responses, which many commentators believe helped turn a serious economic downturn into a prolonged and devastating global disaster. But if history is any guide, those lessons will have been long forgotten during the next collapse. Eventually, fed by a mood of desperation and growing public anger, restrictions on trade, finance, investment, and immigration will almost certainly intensify. Authorities and ordinary citizens will likely scrutinize the cross-border movement of Americans and outsiders alike, and lawmakers may even call for a general crackdown on nonessential travel. Meanwhile, many nations will make transporting or sending funds to other countries exceedingly difficult. As desperate officials try to limit the fallout from decades of ill-conceived, corrupt, and reckless policies, they will introduce controls on foreign exchange. Foreign individuals and companies seeking to acquire certain American infrastructure assets, or trying to buy property and other assets on the cheap thanks to a rapidly depreciating dollar, will be stymied by limits on investment by noncitizens. Those efforts will cause spasms to ripple across economies and markets, disrupting global payment, settlement, and clearing mechanisms. All of this will, of course, continue to undermine business confidence and consumer spending. In a world of lockouts and lockdowns, any link that transmits systemic financial pressures across markets through arbitrage or portfolio-based risk management, or that allows diseases to be easily spread from one country to the next by tourists and wildlife, or that otherwise facilitates unwelcome exchanges of any kind will be viewed with suspicion and dealt with accordingly. The rise in isolationism and protectionism will bring about ever more heated arguments and dangerous confrontations over shared sources of oil, gas, and other key commodities as well as factors of production that must, out of necessity, be acquired from less-than-friendly nations. Whether involving raw materials used in strategic industries or basic necessities such as food, water, and energy, efforts to secure adequate supplies will take increasing precedence in a world where demand seems constantly out of kilter with supply. Disputes over the misuse, overuse, and pollution of the environment and natural resources will become more commonplace. Around the world, such tensions will give rise to full scale military encounters, often with minimal provocation. In some instances, economic conditions will serve as a convenient pretext for conflicts that stem from cultural and religious differences. Alternatively, nations may look to divert attention away from domestic problems by channeling frustration and populist sentiment toward other countries and cultures. Enabled by cheap technology and the waning threat of American retribution, terrorist groups will likely boost the frequency and scale of their horrifying attacks, bringing the threat of random violence to a whole new level. Turbulent conditions will encourage aggressive saber rattling and interdictions by rogue nations running amok. Age-old clashes will also take on a new, more heated sense of urgency. China will likely assume an increasingly belligerent posture toward Taiwan, while Iran may embark on overt colonization of its neighbors in the Mideast. Israel, for its part, may look to draw a dwindling list of allies from around the world into a growing number of conflicts. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have even speculated that an “intense confrontation” between the United States and China is “inevitable” at some point. More than a few disputes will turn out to be almost wholly ideological. Growing cultural and religious differences will be transformed from wars of words to battles soaked in blood. Long-simmering resentments could also degenerate quickly, spurring the basest of human instincts and triggering genocidal acts. Terrorists employing biological or nuclear weapons will vie with conventional forces using jets, cruise missiles, and bunker-busting bombs to cause widespread destruction. Many will interpret stepped-up confl icts between Muslims and Western societies as the beginnings of a new world war.

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