Guest Post by Morbo
Two weeks ago, I criticized the Minutemen, the anti-immigration group, for pretending to patrol the U.S.-Canadian border when everyone knows their real goal is keeping Hispanics out of the country.
The Minutemen and other “seal the border” (with Mexico) groups claim that illegal Hispanic workers take jobs from Americans. I’ve always doubted that, and now we’ve been handed a perfect opportunity to test the claim. Millions of heads of lettuce may rot in Southern California’s farmland because no one wants to pick it. The jobs are there. Who wants them?
As The Washington Post reported:
With the lettuce harvest beginning, farmers in the $1 billion winter vegetable industry are panicking about getting their crops out of the ground. Vegetable growers estimate they could be 32,000 workers short of the 54,000 they need for the winter harvest, which runs until March. Last year, local farmers left hundreds of acres of lettuce in the fields because they lacked the manpower to harvest it.
Let’s be grown-ups here. Most of the workers who pick this stuff are illegals. It’s a crummy job. The hours are long, the pay stinks. The work is difficult, and there are no benefits.
Americans don’t want these jobs. One grower, Jack Vessey, said he listed 300 openings with the state office of employment. “We got one person,” Vessey told The Post. “He showed up and said, ‘I’m not going to do that.'”
This year, stepped-up border patrols and the lousy work conditions have scared the illegals away. Others have decided to work construction jobs, which pay better.
No one seems to be living in the real world here. I can’t sympathize with the growers, who treat the workers like machines. As for the American people, they by and large continue to live in a fantasyland of cognitive dissonance. Everyone wants their winter vegetables on the table, yet many refuse to concede that they get there thanks to a large pool of cheap (and yes, illegal) workers who pull them out of the fields.
There has to be a better way.
Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho) have proposed an agriculture-jobs bill that would allow Mexicans workers to legally cross the border for seasonal field work while remaining citizens of Mexico. Illegals already in the country could begin to work toward citizenship.
I don’t know if the Kennedy-Craig bill is the answer, but if it opens up a long overdue dialogue on this issue and pushes the simplistic “solutions” of border sealing out of the picture it’s worth considering. The bill may require some fine-tuning. I think it puts too much onus on the government and lets the growers off too easily by permitting them to treat “guest workers” just a notch better than slaves. But I do know this: It’s time to quit listening to the borderline racist claptrap peddled by the seal-the-border crowd. Their scheme could work — but only if Americans do one of two things: stop eating fruit and vegetables or agree to harvest the crops themselves.
Vessey laid it out in simple terms: “Most people out there say, ‘Let’s close the borders. And then we’ll just go down to Vons [a California supermarket chain] and get our vegetables.’ Well, it doesn’t work that way.”
Indeed it doesn’t. Think about that while you enjoy your salad.