Somebody gets it right on immigration

The Sacramento Bee on Sunday ran one of the best articles I've seen on the undocumented worker issue, with lots of background and actuals business realities. Unbelievable, I know. But sometimes the Establishment press comes through.

The piece is Roots of a dilemma: Out in the fields, farmers sweat out immigration issue by Susan Ferriss 07/02/06 (it was even on page 1!). What especially interesting about this one is that she interviews various hardcore Republican growers who are saying, look, we've got to have the Mexican and Latin American workers one way or another.

This little story gives a good flavor of the article:

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, tomato grower [Luawanna] Hallstrom [a Republican] participated in her own, unexpected hiring experiment.

Her company, Harry Singh & Sons, leases land on Camp Pendleton, a U.S. Marine base. Hallstrom lost most of her work force when a post-Sept. 11 security check of military installations found 75 percent of her workers were undocumented.

Desperate for workers she could be sure were legal, Hallstrom advertised. Nobody came. She turned to the H-2A program, which was so slow in authorizing workers, she said, $2.5 million worth of tomatoes rotted on the vine.

"It really shed a light on the fact that there were not enough legally documented farmworkers to do this," she said. "It wasn't us crying wolf."

The H-2A visa program allows workers to immigrate legally. But one of the concerns about the proposed "guest worker" program is just what Hallstrom described: the federal immigration service is so slow in processing applicants that real reason to worry about whether a guest-worker program wouldn't leave large portions of American agribusiness in the same situation Hallstrom found herself.

The article is worth reading if only to see how these crusty Republican growers view the xenophobic loonies who think they can seal the border.

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