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22 WINES&VINES April 2017 WINE INDUSTRY NEWS Y akima, Wash.—Northwest grapegrow- ers are telling federal lawmakers to respect their workers. "We need to tell this administration, 'A strong border is OK, but don't sell us down the river,'" Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League in Yakima, Wash., said Feb. 8 during a special session on farm labor at the Washington Winegrowers conven- tion in Kennewick. Similar comments surfaced at the Oregon Wine Symposium held in late February in Portland, where growers applauded John Pratt for calling on the industry to protect workers and ensure draconian enforcement measures are not carried out. The day before Pratt's comments, federal measures approved expedited deportation of illegal migrants who had been in the country longer than two weeks and were farther than 100 miles from the point of entry. Previously, expedited de- portation was allowed only for recent arrivals within 100 miles of the border. "Those rules have been changed," Pratt, a grapegrower and winemaker in Medford, Ore., said bluntly. "Those rules now apply to undocu- mented workers anywhere in the country. I think we need to do some things to ensure those rules are not carried out." Specifically, Pratt encouraged the wine in- dustry to underscore to local law enforcement officials the importance of vineyard workers— especially those without papers who have settled out—to the agricultural sector. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers primarily have been responsible for deporta- tions in the past, the recent changes mean local law enforcement now has greater powers in this regard. Gempler argued for a similar strategy in Washington state, noting that a large pool of vineyard labor now calls the United States home but lacks papers and needs help to be- come legal. "A good part of our labor pool— good people, hardworking," are not legally allowed to work in the United States, he said. Craig Carroll, agricultural program man- ager with the Washington state Department of Employment Security in Olympia, told Wash- ington Winegrowers that the percentage of workers self-identifying in anonymous surveys as undocumented declined from 50% to 47% between 2012 and 2014. The majority of for- eign-born farmworkers now come from within the United States, especially so-called "supply states" in the Southwest and South. One option to secure legal workers for vine- yard labor is the 65-year-old H-2A visa pro- gram, which has increased in popularity since 2005. Washington now ranks fourth among the states in its use of H-2A workers, with 11,844 such workers issued those visas in 2015. The number of visa holders is expected to reach 15,000 this year, representing up- wards of 15% of the state's agricultural work- force. Use of the H-2A program is less in Oregon. The state ranks 37th with just 575 workers employed under the program in 2015. Still, the use of H-2A workers isn't without its challenges. Mercer Canyons Inc. of Prosser, Wash., discovered this in 2014, when 600 sea- sonal workers initiated a class-action lawsuit alleging that they were not informed of jobs offered to foreign workers. Mercer agreed to pay class members $545,000 to settle the action, plus $650,000 for the plaintiffs' legal fees. —Peter Mitham Northwest Growers Defend Migrant Workers, Urge Restraint by Law Enforcement