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AG Act & the adjustment to H-2C status
Story Date: 4/16/2018
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Source: AMERICAN DAIRY COALITION, 4/13/18
Contrary to the assertion that the recent Washington Post story illustrates an example of why H.R. 4760 is insufficient to ensure an orderly transition of workers, the opposite is in fact true. The situation outlined in the Washington Post story is EXACTLY the type of scenario the precertification and advance travel authorization provisions in the AG Act are designed to avoid.
Unlike the scenario in the Washington Post story, unauthorized agricultural workers will undergo a DHS background check and become pre-certified to join the H-2C program before they step outside the United States for the purpose of attaining legal H-2C status. Workers who clear the background check and become pre-certified will be granted an advance authorization document (aka “advance parole”) permitting them to come back into the U.S. without going to a consulate (the AG Act allows them to merely leave and re-enter through a regular border checkpoint). Thus, their admissibility, as well as their eligibility to join the H-2C program, will be established before they ever leave the U.S.
It is important to understand that an advance parole document is very different from a provisional unlawful presence waiver (which is the process the Post story’s subject used to travel outside the U.S.) No one is suggesting that an agricultural worker leave the U.S. with a provisional unlawful presence waiver. Note also that the AG Act explicitly and statutorily waives the 3 and 10-year bars against admissibility for the purpose of an agricultural worker joining the H-2C program.
The scenario in the Washington Post story involves an individual who was not granted advance parole and for whom a consular interview was required. Unlike the process offered in the AG Act, which will provide aliens with notice of their admissibility prior to them leaving the U.S., the individual in the Washington Post story did not have his eligibility to adjust his status pre-certified. Thus, when it was determined that he was inadmissible or disqualified from entering the U.S. for some reason for which he had not been granted a waiver by law, his plans to return to the U.S. were compromised.
The opportunity for agricultural workers to have their eligibility to join the H-2C program pre-certified while in the U.S. and to obtain an advance authorization to step outside the U.S. and return without processing through a consulate, is indeed an VERY unique and exceptional circumstance offered only to agricultural workers and only under the AG Act.
This is one of many reasons we must take advantage of this rare opportunity to pass the AG Act in the House of Representatives.
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