Senator shifts immigration views
WASHINGTON — Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand took all of a week to do an about-face on immigration issues for her new big-city constituents, proclaiming Monday that she is against deporting undocumented immigrants and is open to letting them become U.S. citizens.
Her first big test on that question, though, may not be in the city at all, but in the milk houses and orchards of upstate New York, where her stand against undocumented workers has frustrated farm groups for two years.
Two senators may bring the farm immigration debate back to the Senate early this year, and the Senate Agriculture Committee — which Mrs. Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has just joined — could play a background role.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vermont, has said he wants to reintroduce a farm guest worker bill soon, figuring it has a better chance of becoming law with Barack Obama in the White House. Farm lobbyists expect Sen. Dianne M. Feinstein, D-Calif., to propose an immigration bill for farm workers, called AgJobs, by spring, following six fruitless years of trying to pass it. The bills would typically come before the Judiciary Committee, but probably not without input from members of the Agriculture Committee, which has been a roadblock in the past.
The last attempt to advance AgJobs failed when leaders of the Senate Agriculture Committee refused to include it in a five-year farm bill last year. Its inclusion threatened to sink the bill.
The timing now may be awkward. Mrs. Gillibrand could win the support of both farmers and urban immigrant communities by softening her stand, but supporting a bill to expand employment for non-citizens is riskier when upstate employers are laying off U.S. citizens by the thousands.
Even the American Farm Bureau Federation, which supports AgJobs, finds the timing uncomfortable. President Obama endorsed it as a candidate last summer, but "that was a significantly different economy then," said Paul Schlegel, director of public policy for the AFBF.
Immigration dogged Mrs. Gillibrand long before she became Gov. David A. Paterson's choice to fill the state's vacant U.S. Senate seat. During a 2007 debate on immigration policy, the New York Farm Bureau and others in favor of giving undocumented workers a chance to stay on farms tried in vain to convince Mrs. Gillibrand to join their cause — even though it was the Farm Bureau's top legislative priority in 2007, and she had been popular with farm groups.
Mrs. Gillibrand, in fact, was more strident on the issue than most of the Republicans in the state's House delegation, who generally lined up to cosponsor the AgJobs bill. Mrs. Gillibrand declined to join them, taking the view the 12 million or so undocumented immigrants in the United States — many of them working on farms — should not be in the country at all.
Anything short of deportation, she said at the time, would amount to "amnesty, " which she told reporters again last week she opposes.
By Monday, however, the headlines suggested otherwise.
Mrs. Gillibrand emerged from weekend meetings with Hispanic leaders to tell a New York City television news station for Spanish speakers she will ask President Obama to immediately halt deportations, and she now supports a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
A spokeswoman for Mrs. Gillibrand did not immediately return a message Monday seeking comment on the immigration issue and whether she would now support AgJobs legislation.
AgJobs would affect the dairy industry, particularly, by opening the H2A seasonal visa program to year-round dairy farm workers for the first time.
Immigrant labor is now an important part of the dairy industry upstate, employing thousands of workers, farm experts say. Farms in Jefferson County alone employ as many as 500, the Jefferson County Agricultural Development Corp. estimates, while some 25,000 immigrants work on farms of all types across the state.
The apple industry especially relies on immigrant labor, without which New York's apple crop could not be picked, the New York Farm Bureau has said. New York ranks second in apple production nationally, behind Washington state. Farm experts say many of those workers are probably undocumented, and the threat of raids and tough enforcement scares away legitimate immigrant labor, as well.
Indeed, Mrs. Gillibrand's stance against undocumented workers was all the more striking because her congressional district included one of the leading apple-producing parts of the state. But the district is also overwhelmingly Republican in voter registration, and she said constituents were clearly against giving those workers a chance to stay here.
The senator has said she supports a guest worker program for newly arrived workers, which would involve a period of time in the United States, then a period of time in their home country before returning to this country temporarily. She has said the period of time here would have to be long enough to be useful to farmers.
Proponents have proposed varying versions of the timeline. Rep. John M. McHugh, R-Pierrepont Manor, last year proposed legislation to allow for a three-year period of admission, to be followed by a possible three-year extension, with no requirement to leave the United States before an extension.
Five upstate lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, signed on, but not Mrs. Gillibrand.
