America needs the work and skills of immigrants, particularly during times when essential industries like healthcare, childcare, and construction are facing critical labor shortages. In Georgia, which has been experiencing “significant” shortages in some of these areas in recent years, the GOP-led state legislature is looking to address this by considering a guest worker proposal that would permit certain migrant workers to fill jobs that are facing a lack of applicants.
“According to the legislative text for HB 82, the bill is aimed at filling positions in areas with labor shortages by hiring ‘willing citizens of other nations to perform work in this state for limited periods of time,’” WSBTV reported Feb. 12. “Before the Georgia Commissioner of Labor can even get the ball rolling on making this program, if the bill passes, a study would have to be done first to determine if there is a labor shortage in Georgia, and which industries are impacted, as well as the scope of the shortage.”
But state legislators don’t need yet another study to confirm what we already know, which is that there aren’t enough workers to fill the millions of open jobs across the U.S., including in Georgia, which was already struggling to fill vacant jobs in “advanced manufacturing, aviation, agriculture, transportation and logistics, and healthcare” even before the disruption of COVID, business news outlet Georgia Trend Magazine reported last year.
What would only exacerbate this shortage? Donald Trump’s promise to build mass detention camps and deport millions of long-settled immigrants critical to our economy. But at the same time as Georgia is considering this “guest worker” program, it’s also backing Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Georgians should know the effects of anti-immigrant policy because the state has already been here before.
Back in 2011, Georgia Republicans passed H.B. 87, an Arizona-style bill that made it a crime to knowingly transport undocumented immigrants – even if it was a friend or loved one – and established a “papers please” policy allowing local law enforcement to harass anyone they “reasonably suspected” to be in the country unlawfully about their legal immigration status. But Georgia also depends on its immigrant workers, who are essential to industries including natural resources, construction and maintenance, and in particular agriculture. The headlines in the months after H.B. 87’s passage said it all.
”Georgia Farmers Say Immigration Law Keeps Workers Away,” NPR reported in 2011. “Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers,” the Associated Press reported the same year. “The Law Of Unintended Consequences: Georgia’s Immigration Law Backfires,” Forbes said in 2011. One report estimated $300 million in crop losses. So, you can imagine there was a lot of relief among the Georgia agricultural industry and other business leaders when the law was blocked. Not many would say it publicly, of course.
Over at The Bulwark, Adrian Carasquillo writes about the effect of similar law in Alabama back around that same time:
In 2011, Alabama passed HB 56, which contained some of these very same provisions. It was widely considered the harshest in the nation at the time. And it was chaos.
Undocumented immigrants fled the state, school attendance plummeted, fruits and vegetables rotted on the vine after farmworkers disappeared and Americans given the chance to replace them couldn’t make it through one day of work.
The National Immigration Law Center found at the time that the costs of HB 56 went far beyond economic dislocation. It created an environment of racial profiling by law enforcement officials and sanctioned discrimination by private citizens against anyone suspected of being “foreign.”
[…]
Albertville Mayor Tracy Honea was swept into office in 2012 amid a backlash against HB 56, a cycle in which every incumbent in the city lost. In an interview with The Bulwark, he danced around how he approached the law at the time. While he said that he does support part of Trump’s immigration policy, he acknowledged he has problems with the administration punishing law-abiding immigrants, even if they’re in the country illegally. His perspective is informed as someone who bears the scars of HB 56.
“I thought they were going after criminals and felons, [and] that’s great,” Mayor Honea told Carasquillo. “But we need to make it easier, if we have folks who have been here for 15 to 20 years and maintain good citizenship, who may or may not be legal, what are we doing to make it simpler for those folks to become legal?” Tony DiMare, a tomato farmer and Trump voter in Florida, echoed similar thoughts to Bloomberg last month, and added his concerns about deporting this workforce. But they should look at the Trump administration’s actions. In opposition to claims of law and order and targeting “the worst of the worst,” the Trump administration removed the prioritization of resources for targeting “criminals” as part of its first-week actions.
And since then, the administration has made it clear it believes all undocumented people are “criminals” and thus a priority for mass detention and deportation even if they have no criminal record and have been contributors for years. This agenda would mean Georgia and Alabama but on a national scale. More than one million farmworkers, gone. More than 200,000 food and production workers, gone. 1.6 million workers in the construction industry, gone. More than 20,000 teachers protected by DACA, gone. More than 200,000 frontline workers, gone. More than 140,000 childcare, personal care, and home care workers, gone.
In states like Georgia, Alabama, and more recently in Iowa, farmers and businesses that stayed silent when their state legislatures were debating anti-immigrant proposals were likely privately relieved when the courts stepped in to block these laws from being fully implemented. But when it comes to Trump’s plans to target millions of long-settled contributors and essential workers – including in industries facing shortages – they’ll need to do more than quietly hope that the courts step in to block this destructive agenda. And, it’s yet another reminder that a lot of the problems facing our states and the nation could be addressed if, instead of vilifying immigrants, we legalized them.