Arizona Proposes State-Run Guest Worker Program
Responding to urgent regional needs for agricultural and unskilled laborers for businesses and agencies within the state, and with no change in store in the near future on a national scale for such immigrants, Arizona has taken steps to begin its own guest worker program. If and when implemented, it would be the first guest worker program created by a state rather than the federal government.
The state legislature has begun "fast-tracking" a bill that would create a state-based temporary work program that would help Arizona businesses comply with the state's sanctions on employers hiring undocumented workers, sanctions that are the toughest in the United States while supplying labor for the critical shortages that many face on a regular basis.
Two bills sponsored by the leaders of the House and Senate and slated to be considered in the Arizona legislature would simplify the application process for employers to just a single application proving need for labor. The application would need to be filed with the Industrial Commission of Arizona. The Commission itself has the ability to determine whether the proposed need is an actual need through its own information and resources as clearinghouse for state labor.
Though many have called for changes to guest worker programs, including states bordering Mexico, US Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano remains committed to actually implementing reform to let Arizona serve as a "pilot for testing changes to the existing federal program," according to the Christian Science Monitor.
The current federal program to bring in temporary unskilled laborers for agricultural purposes falls under the H-2A visa category, which is little used because it very restrictive and eats up time going through the bureaucratic red tape. For instance, one requirement is to spend a period of time attempting to recruit and hire American workers for the positions.
Recently, in early February, the Labor Department proposed changes to streamline these bureaucratic procedures, acknowledging that only around 75,000 laborers were in the United States with an H-2A visa while somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 undocumented laborers were working similar agricultural jobs.
But many states bordering Mexico are more interested in speed and results rather than acknowledgements, and so will anxiously await the decision of Arizona's state legislature in passing the measures, as well as the state's appeal to the Labor Department for dispensation to carry out their plans.