Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers are pursuing bipartisan legislation that would revamp the H-2A program.
The peak time for H-2A visa applications is from January to April, he says.
The H-2A visa controversy involving farm workers exemplifies labor's mixed bag as much as any other issue.
However, for farm workers, there was a major problem: it also reduced wages for H-2A visa holders.
Right now, dairy farms are ineligible for the temporary visa program, called H-2A, which is only for seasonal workers.
This would be particularly important in the case of H-2A visas for agriculture, where the power firms have over workers can lead to abuse.
Buffenstein said his book did not even attempt to explain the bureaucratic and cumbersome process growers must endure to hire farm workers legally on H-2A visas.
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However, today, America has only a bureaucratic H-2A visa category that pleases neither growers nor the farm workers union, and a cumbersome H-2B visa for short-term seasonal work outside of agriculture.
Meanwhile, ahead of their coming harvest, many farmers are turning to a temporary agricultural visa, known as the H-2A program, which allows growers to bring workers into the U.S. for a short period.
Immigration attorneys said the J-1 visa program doesn't face the same oversight as other temporary-worker programs, such as the H-1B, commonly used to bring in skilled workers, or the H-2A, for seasonal agricultural laborers.
The original idea behind the Bush administration's changes to the H-2A program--which went through a lengthy rulemaking process--was to cut out the red tape in the visa process and make the wage structure more efficient.
Growers consider the underutilized H-2A visa for seasonal agricultural workers burdensome and litigation-prone, while employers have often used up the annual quota of H-2B temporary visas for seasonal workers in resorts, crab fishing, nurseries and other industries.
This analysis by Cassidy and other commentators neglects to consider there is an important problem with many of the current job related visas, including H-1B, H-2B, and H-2A: a potential immigrant is not simply permitted to work in this country, but only permitted to work for a specific employer who petitioned for the visa to hire them.
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