Let me just give a few examples of that collapse. According to the General Accounting Office report issued the end of 1997. there were 600.000 illegal agricultural workers in the United States600.000. In my State of Florida. a major agricultural production State. in 1997 the number of H2A visas. the visas that would create a legal status for an alien agricultural worker. were four. not 400 or 4.000. but four. Third. the American worker is disadvantaged under the current system. As an example. if an American agricultural worker is employed by an American farmer. the American farmer must pay Social Security and other employment taxes on the wages earned by that American farm worker. But if the American farmer employs a nonU.S. farm worker. those taxes do not have to be collected and. thus. there is an incentive to employ the foreign worker before employing the American worker. Farmers are in a sea of complexity. There is a process under the current law in which a farmer can make an application for an H2A worker. Supposedly. that application is to be processed within 20 days. In 1996. more than onethird of the applications failed to meet that 20day processing period. and so the farmer was not able to get a signal as to whether his request for legal foreign workers would be met.
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visas H2A