Obama's Immigration Plan May Change the Picking Order

(Wine-Searcher) - The president's immigrant plan might hurt rather than help the wine industry.

California vineyard owners have long used workers from Mexico – with and without visas – to pick grapes.

"Hand-harvested grapes are a luxury that would not exist without the immigrant workforce that we have, be they documented or undocumented," said John Aguirre, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers.

Growers are very interested in immigration reform. However, Aguirre said the executive measures announced last week by President Obama will not help the wine industry.

"The President's executive action is the symptom of a broken political process," Aguirre told Wine Searcher. "Some people are going to be helped. Unfortunately it falls well short of the solution we want."

Nat DiBuduo, president of Allied Grape Growers, says San Joaquin Valley farmers are scrambling to put together a meeting on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, to discuss a response to Obama's action.

"I'm cautiously optimistic because I'm in support of comprehensive immigration reform," DiBuduo told Wine Searcher. "But I think it's gotta come from Congress. The two parties need to get together and work it out."

Aguirre favored a bill passed last year by the Senate that would have given farmworkers a shorter path to legal status than workers in other fields. But the House never voted on the bill, so it withered on the vine.

Obama's action has no specific provisions for farmworkers. The administration has said it cannot create a farmworker visa on its own. But without special immigration status for farmworkers, Aguirre fears that people who came to the U.S. to pick grapes will move to higher-paying jobs as soon as they can.

This job shift was widespread a decade ago, when the construction industry was booming along with the real estate market. Vineyards had a hard time keeping even experienced, skilled workers for pruning and picking.

"Agricultural jobs are hard and people who can speak English and who have even a high-school degree are going to take their skills somewhere else," Aguirre said.

The mortgage crisis in 2008 took the wind out of the construction market, easing the picker shortage.

"The irony of the drought is that as acres went out of production, we had an excess of vineyard workers this year," Aguirre said. But that may not continue for long because stepped-up enforcement on the Mexican border means that workers who go home tend to stay longer, and possibly never return.

"Agricultural labor is skilled labor, whether you're doing pruning operations or running equipment," DiBuduo said. "If we don't get more workers, we're going to force more mechanization. But it takes skilled labor to run the machinery, and some tasks are not adaptable to mechanization."