I'm Michigan cherry, apple farmer. The workers I need can't get driver's licenses. | Opinion

I am a sixth-generation cherry and apple farmer in Grand Traverse County. I am also a former legislative staffer whose boss, a Senate Republican, opposed a move in 2009 to remove driver's license access from a variety of Michigan residents, from migrant farmworkers to new immigrants and visa holders.

The senator I worked for represented a heavily agricultural region. He voted no because he knew Michigan’s farmers rely strongly on the migrant workers who have been coming to Michigan for generations — and often have mixed status families, due to our broken national immigration system.

While the senator I served voted no, the 2009 bill passed.

Thirteen years later, this restriction on driver's licenses isn’t helping anyone.  

What it has done is negatively impact Michigan’s agricultural sector, which contributes about $104 billion each year to the state’s economy, preventing farmers from having full access to the skilled workforce we badly need, who traditionally have come north to pick crops each year. It is important to note that this legislation has had a chilling effect for all migrant workers, regardless of their legal status.

Right now, the Michigan Legislature is considering Senate Bills 265-267 and House Bills 4410-4412, which would restore the ability to get driver's licenses and state IDs for immigrants who are Michigan residents but do not have legal presence, including folks who overstay their visas, undocumented immigrants, some international adoptees, and others.

Make Michigan safer:Drive SAFE bills will restore rights for adoptees, immigrants, like me | Opinion

In an economy nearing full employment, workers prefer to travel to states where their freedoms will be respected, rather than to states that have created a mandate for law enforcement to engage in profiling and document checks. This restriction actively prevents people with work authorization from getting employment.

If license law stays, Michigan's farming economy will die on the vine

Farmers have always been reliant on migrant workers and students. As population has declined, and after this law took effect, Northern Michigan farmers have seen a dramatic drop in the number of migrant workers who come up from Florida and Texas to help us plant, tend and harvest our crops in northern Michigan. 

I have talked to migrant families who had legal status, but stopped coming because they didn’t want to be profiled, with the license law as an excuse.

Since this law was adopted, millions of pounds of Michigan produce have rotted in the field because we don't have enough workers to harvest the crops.

Labor is tight, which hurts our economy and our viability as farmers. Federal immigration policy certainly has a lot of gray areas. That is not something we in Michigan can fix. But we in Michigan do have tools to ease a tough situation here in our state.

It is critical that we reinstate driver's licenses to the workers who power Michigan’s second-largest economic sector.

Isaiah Wunsch, a sixth-generation farmer, is CEO of Third Coast Fruit/Wunsch Farms in Grand Traverse County.