Speech #930330208

Well. I think that in an ideal world it should not be necessary to threaten farmers with the loss of their workers if they did not provide decent housing for them. I think that many farmers would like to provide adequate housing for their workers. but they find the capital investment too great to justify the expenditure when. as in the case of migrant workers. the worker is only going to be working for perhaps 2 months. maybe less time in his fields. and yet he will have a capital investment in a house that will sit there for 12 months and. perhaps. 10 of those months empty. It seems to me that if the Senator is suggesting that rather than building additional farm labor houses for not only the migrants but for those who are permanent residents of the communities. that we just cut off an authorization to the farmer to use migrants. we would have to pass additional legislation to accomplish that and. it would seem to me. that it would be counterproductive in two respects: one. at a time when there is a worldwide food shortage it does not seem to me to be advisable to be cutting productivity on farms even if the farmer himself. as a matter of obstinacy. and one who could afford to do otherwise. refuses to build adequate housing. But I also have to be aware of a second point which would seem to me to negate the validity of my distinguished colleagues suggestion. and that is that many farmers just do not have the money to build housing for migrants where they are only going to be on the farm for a couple months during the course of the year. If this proposal were law. then they would not be able to harvest their crop because they did not build the housing. and yet they do not have the money to build the housing. so they are caught in a vicious circle. and it does not seem to me that that would be the appropriate way of going about it. It seems to me the appropriate way to go about it is to look at it as a national program. s our national conscience demands that we have adequate housing for not only the migrants but for the permanent farmworkers as well. and that is what we did when we started the FHA program. that is what we did when we started the VA program. Of course. middleincome people. middleincome constituents. have a bigger voice. there are more of them. I recognize that.