For those who may share my fascination with the awfulness of the Washington Post’s immigration coverage, you won’t want to miss another recent corker by the policy geniuses on the Post’s editorial board.

CHECK OUT the asparagus you have for dinner, the cucumber in your salad and the pear on your plate for dessert. Chances are none would be there if not for the undocumented farmworkers who plant and pick most of the fruit and vegetables grown in this country.

Let’s think about that for a moment. If every illegal alien in the country were suddenly gone, what would happen? Well, today, there probably wouldn’t be any asparagus, cucumbers, or pears picked. The next day, the asparagus, cucumber, and pear growers would place help wanted ads for new workers.

Some of them would be smart enough to try to make their ads more appealing by offering a higher wage.

Other growers would have to follow suit, of course, and wages offered would continue to rise until they reached the level that provided a work force for all the growers. That’s Economics 101. And if the wages rose high enough, perhaps mechanization would make economic sense. However it occurred, simple market forces would soon replenish our tables with all the asparagus, cucumbers, and pears we need.

True, asparagus, cucumbers, and pears might cost more in the grocery store, but only slightly. The portion of your produce dollar that goes to the field worker who actually picks it is only a few pennies. Moreover, the higher price we’d pay for asparagus, cucumbers, and pears would be offset by the money we’d save not having to pay for the medical, educational, and other social costs we now shoulder to subsidize the asparagus, cucumber, and pear growers and their illegal labor force.

Nonetheless, faced with a serious and growing shortage of legal agricultural labor, Congress has followed the same playbook it has used for the broader issue of illegal immigration: political cowardice and empty slogans followed by inaction.

First, by what evidence does the writer of this editorial justify the use of the words “serious” and “growing?” Those are run-of-the-mill scare words.

Second, the emptiest slogan in the immigration debate that I can think of is “comprehensive immigration reform,” and the editorial page of the Washington Post has been a leading sloganeer for it. On top of emptiness, that particular slogan also has the distinction of being politically misleading, since it really means an amnesty disguised as much as possible and a giant increase in legal immigration.

Both positions are anathema to the American people, the very people, in fact, Congress is supposed to represent. The Washington Post asserts that those members of Congress who actually represent their constituents on this issue are guilty of political cowardice. Apparently, the Washington Post’s editorial board believes a member of Congress demonstrates political courage by enacting legislation opposed by his or her constituents, but supported by the Washington Post and monied interests with armies of K Street lobbyists on their payrolls.

At least half, and possibly as many as 70 percent, of the 1.6 million farmworkers in America are undocumented immigrants, and their employers are painfully aware that there are not enough U.S.-born citizens and legal immigrants to do all the labor-intensive work they require.

The sheer ignorance of basic economics represented by the sentence above is glaring. Our nation of 300 million can’t supply a work force of 1.6 million. With a population of 301.6 million there would be “enough” U.S.-born citizens and legal immigrants and US farmers wouldn’t “need” the 1.6 million illegal aliens now picking crops. See: Honey? We’re out of humans.

Agribusiness, farmworkers unions and enlightened lawmakers from both parties have pleaded for solutions, only to be foiled by congressional Republicans and swing-state Democrats who dare not support legislation that would provide undocumented farmworkers with a path to legalization — the dread “amnesty” of 30-second attack ads.

Swing-state Democrats? The most recent big immigration battle was over the justly maligned Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. Senate Democrats who helped “foil” the bill were from Missouri, Michigan, Louisiana, Virginia, Nevada, California, and Arkansas. Three states had two Democratic senators who both voted to kill the bill. They were West Virginia, North Dakota, and Montana. Of those ten states, only Missouri and Michigan and, possibly, Virginia, can be considered “swing-states.” The Washington Post editorial is just plain wrong in its analysis.

To say “provide undocumented farmworkers with a path to legalization” is to say “amnesty,” only with seven extra words. The word “amnesty” is too honest and direct for the Washington Post, which sneeringly puts scare quotes around it.

By doing nothing to ensure a steady, reliable and sufficient labor force for farms, it’s a good bet that Congress will make things worse, and soon. Faced with understandable public pressure to tighten border security, federal authorities have added personnel, technology and fencing to make it increasingly difficult for people to enter America illegally. Reports in the past year of vegetables and fruit rotting in fields and orchards for lack of hands to harvest them have failed to give Congress sufficient impetus to act. Look for the labor shortages, and instances of rotting produce, to grow more acute next year.

There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a free market economy.

Suppose the owner of a restaurant puts a sign in the window reading: Dishwasher wanted—$2.00 per hour. A month goes by and no one applies for the job. So he announces that there is a dishwasher shortage in the United States. Dishwashing, he says, is a job Americans won’t do. He demands Congress allow him to import a dishwasher from Bangladesh.

Now, the average 12-year-old would be able to discern the self-serving fallacy in the restaurant owner’s claim of a labor shortage. But to the brilliant minds on the editorial board of the Washington Post, the restaurant owner is making a legitimate claim. They even go so far as to join him in demanding Congress allow him to import that Bangladeshi (and his family), indifferent to the effect on the taxpayers whose wage base is eroded, but nevertheless have to pick up the costs of the social services a $2 per hour worker and his family will use.

As Congress dithers, fair and balanced legislation to deal with the problem languishes. The so-called AgJobs bill would allow some 800,000 undocumented workers — qualified farmhands who have been working here for several seasons — to register, pay fines and legalize their immigration status by working in agriculture three to five more years before they could qualify for green cards.

First of all, qualified farmhands? What makes one qualified to pick strawberries?

Second, the AgJobs monstrosity is much more than what the Post makes it out to be. Here is a brief summary of just some of the outrageous components of the bill (most recently championed by Senator Diane Feinstein of California).

At the same time, it would provide a more sensible way to ensure an adequate supply of farm labor by streamlining the current H-2A visa program for agricultural guest workers, which is so cumbersome and unreliable that farmers use it for only an estimated 2 percent of all farmworkers.

Sure, why go through the hassle of playing by the rules when there is an unending stream of illegal aliens ready for exploitation? No wonder only two percent of all farm workers are legal guest workers. The editorialists at the Washington Post cite that statistic as proof the program isn’t working. The solution, for those policy geniuses, is to amnesty the illegals already here, and “streamline” the existing guestworker program.

But, since amnesties, unsurprisingly, encourage more illegal immigration, how streamlined would a guest worker program have to be in order to get agribusiness to use it—especially with the new flood of even more illegal aliens available?

The provisions in the H-2A visa program that are meant to protect American workers would obviously have to go. And any requirement on the part of the employer would have to go. In other words, “streamlined,” by the Washington Post’s prescription, would mean, essentially, open the flood gates.

Having failed to pass comprehensive immigrations reform this year, Congress has tried to deal with the problem piecemeal. The AgJobs piece is among the most critical. The realistic alternative to it is not arrest and deportation, as anti-immigration activists may imagine.

I don’t know of a single immigration activist who imagines the only alternative to mass amnesty is mass deportations. The only time we hear of mass deportation is when anti-borders erase-the-nation zealots set it and mass amnesty up in a false dichotomy—a favorite rhetorical device of demagogues everywhere.

It is the prospect of undocumented workers leaving the farms for higher-paying, year-round jobs in the cities;

If we amnesty illegal farm workers they’ll stay on the farms instead of leaving for higher paying jobs in the cities? What, out of gratitude?

of a country increasingly unable to meet its own demand for food; and of hundreds of thousands of workers in a vital industry doing backbreaking work without basic employment protections.

How about some basic protections for American workers? Like, maybe, let’s protect American workers from having their financial legs cut out from under them by a Congress too eager to do the bidding of the corpocracy and the $9 million it pours into Washington, DC every day influencing legislation for its own financial benefit. And how about some basic protections for our democracy against the lackeys on editorial boards who carry the water for the monied interests, subverting our democracy, and harming the working man for the benefit of a few?

That amounts to a moral blight on America and an indictment of a political system incapable of fixing fundamental problems.

One of the biggest reasons our political system has the problems it does is that the nation’s press, the institution the Founders envisioned as acting as the eyes and ears for Americans to ensure good governance, has become corrupt, lazy, ignorant, self-serving, dishonorable, and corporate. Some of the most egregious examples of that are the immigration editorials and coverage of the immigration issue by the Washington Post.

Rot in the Fields;
As farmworkers become scarcer, Congress dithers.
Washington Post,
December 3, 2007

Tags:   AgJobs · amnesty · labor shortage · Washington PostNo Comments