The Labor Department's reversal of a Bush administration rule may do more harm than good for Western New York farmers ... and could pass along extra costs to consumers.

Labor-rights advocates, though, are pleased that the department has issued a new regulation that will increase farm-worker pay, add job-safety protections for migrant workers and task growers with making more of an effort to find Americans to pick crops and do other harvest-time jobs.

Rules affecting the H-2A guest-worker program were adopted just before President George W. Bush left office. The Labor Department suspended that regulation last May. Now, the new rule scheduled to take effect March 15 will increase the average pay for temporary farm workers by nearly a dollar per hour.

Farmers also will have to list their job openings on a new online job registry, while state work force agencies must inspect worker housing before employers can get approval to hire foreign laborers.

Those are worthwhile protections. But many of them already are in place, including job postings. The change mostly means more bureaucratic red tape for farmers struggling to find workers who are in this country legally and willing to work. Illegal immigrant workers who show up at the door with false paperwork cause even more problems.

Hiring Americans sounds great, but farmers often complain that Americans hardly want such work. And the new regulations add more paperwork to a program already snarled in red tape. The free housing provided to migrant labor, for example, already is inspected by a bevy of agencies, including Health and Labor Departments at the county and state levels and the Department of Environmental Services.

What farm-worker rules truly need is streamlining, which the previous administration was in the process of doing. Now the Obama administration has done the opposite. Meaningful changes to the H-2A program that would allow farmers to legally bring foreign workers here on temporary work visas would have helped.

An AgJOBS bill introduced a couple of years ago and still waiting for action is supported by Sens. Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who sits on the Agricultural Committee, and by Reps. Louise M. Slaughter, Chris Lee and Brian Higgins and would have been the ticket. The bill has two significant parts, including revising the present H-2A program and addressing undocumented workers who now work in agriculture. This bill would not grant amnesty to farm workers and would not take jobs away from Americans, according to the New York Apple Association.

The AgJOBS bill examines the needs of agriculture when it comes to immigration reform ... an area President Obama has, so far, failed to adequately address.