YAKIMA — Citing an urgent need to bring in guest workers for the upcoming apple harvest, the Washington Farm Labor Association said Tuesday it will resume scheduling border crossings for guest workers. But association officials warned that a massive backlog in visa applications could worsen an existing labor shortage and jeopardize the state’s apple crop.
The Lacey-based association, which assists growers with a range of human resource issues, including managing the H-2A visa guest worker process, said farmworkers need to be assigned a high priority as the State Department tackles a backlog of some 200,000 visa applications.
The U.S. State Department says on its website that priority goes to applications that have been pending the longest, but that particular attention is given to adoption and humanitarian cases, and medical emergencies.
Association Director Dan Fazio said in a news release that farmworkers need to be at the top, too, because the state is facing an estimated 15 percent labor shortage.
“Unless farmworkers are added to that list, there may be a disaster,” Fazio said.
Apple harvest in the Yakima Valley has started this week with a trickle of Gingergolds; Galas are expected to be ready by about Aug. 15.
The normally two-day crossing process for farmworkers with special H-2A guest worker visas began to slow July 7, according to Fazio, and then ground to a halt after a computer glitch crashed the visa database on July 20.
The most recent update earlier this week from the State Department website said the agency is “working to bring the Consular Consolidated Database back to full operational capacity.”
Nonimmigrant visa status covers a wide variety of applicants, from children being adopted by U.S. parents to foreign actors working in this country, as well as the farmworkers.
Fazio said the delays are costly for growers because they must feed and house workers waiting at the border. The logistics of scheduling transportation for the workers — some of whom travel at grower expense from distant states in southern Mexico — has been especially difficult, Fazio said.
That’s why he stopped scheduling visa requests late last month. But he will now resume on Aug. 11.
Farmers in the Northwest are seeking about 1,500 new worker visas for apple and pear harvest, Fazio said. They will join about 7,000 guest workers already in the state. The farm labor association plans to schedule 725 border crossing appointments next week.
“We are planning to schedule visa applications Aug. 11, after suspending them late last month, because we believe, hope and pray they will get priority status – or won’t need it because the system will be fixed,” Fazio said in an email response to a question.
Fazio said “hard work” by the staffs of Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and U.S. Rep. Denny Heck, D-Olympia, helped speed up the processing of some visa requests.
He said Murray’s office has communicated that the Consulate General in Tijuana has made the guest workers its “first priority.”
The farm labor association is urging growers to contact their congressional representatives to urge them to make farm workers a priority.
Pete Verbrugge, president of Valley Fruit in Wapato, has some H-2A employees in his orchards now and is expecting more to arrive in September. He does not have any currently stuck on the border, but says finding labor is a perennial concern.
“We always worry about that,” Verbrugge said.
