The RAISE Act that U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton introduced in February would slash permanent legal immigration, but it doesn’t address at all the immigration issue that may be most pressing back home in Arkansas: temporary workers.
“So much of the need in Arkansas is temporary labor, especially in the ag and timber sectors,” said Randy Zook, CEO of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce/Associated Industries of Arkansas. “Without temporary immigrant labor, there wouldn’t have been a pine tree planted in Arkansas in the past 30 years.”
Guest worker visas — H-2A for agriculture workers and H-2B for non-agriculture, including timber — are in such short supply that crops requiring labor-intensive harvesting sometimes rot in the fields. “It’s gotten that critical. It’s gotten that dumb,” Zook said.
Max Braswell, executive vice president of the Arkansas Forestry Association, said his members — private owners of timberland who employ tree-planters during the first quarter of the year — would welcome a change in the law that would streamline the process for returning workers.
These temporary jobs are not attractive to citizens, Braswell said.
“Our history shows that it’s difficult to find people who want to do that kind of work. It’s labor-intensive, it’s tough and it’s transitory, so to speak,” he said. “There’s an impression that if the jobs were available, American workers would just line up for them. But that has not been the case.”