The H-2A visa program is an example of how legal immigration can supply labor in America, but farmers say reform is needed.
LAKE VILLAGE, Ark.—On a breezy day, sun and shadow dance across Mencer farms, turning it into a patchwork of green in the fertile Arkansas Delta.
It is humid here in the deep South, where the clock seems to run slower and the temperature hotter than in other places.
Lake Village is a small town sitting along Lake Chicot, an abandoned channel of the Mississippi River. Over thousands of years, flooding deposited rich alluvial soil, making it ideal for crops like rice, cotton, soybeans, and corn.
As a child, William Mencer’s grandfather handed him a cowboy hat and a garden hoe to dig up the pigweeds growing between the crop rows.
The 31-year-old farmer remembers spending long, sweltering days alongside the farmworkers, his hands growing rough and calloused with the effort.
“So I learned, you know, what it was like for these workers,” he told The Epoch Times.
He vowed to escape the sweat and toil of the fields by going to law school and working in an office. But the family farm drew him back like a love song.
Now, he is partnering with his father, Joe Mencer, to keep the farm afloat with temporary agriculture workers through the H-2A visa program.
The fourth-generation family farm, which costs $4 million a year to operate, includes 6,000 acres they own and lease.
While some may claim agriculture needs illegal immigrants to pick crops and work the fields, Joe Mencer told The Epoch Times they’ve never had an illegal immigrant come looking for work.
They can’t get anyone local to work either, meaning if they didn’t have the guest farm workers, they couldn’t stay in business.
What Is the H-2A Visa?
It costs more to bring in temporary legal workers than it would if they could find enough people locally to work. But without temporary migrant workers, William Mencer said local farms would go bust, impacting the nation’s food security.
The process has become much more complex since the Mencers began using the guest worker program back in the 1980s.
So much so that the younger Mercer started a small law practice helping other farmers obtain the labor they sorely needed.
