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 Editorials | Opinions | October 2007 
Bush Picks Battle and Nobody Picks Fruit
 CSUL 49er
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Hey beach dwellers, especially you vegetarians, prepare to fork over double the premium price for that garden salad, because unless our federal government fixes the immigration problem real soon, you'll need to learn how to digest meat.
There was a time not too long ago when Congress had a chance to improve the lives of the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States by overhauling immigration laws, but politicians couldn't agree on legislative language, scrapped the plan and moved on to the next issue.
Now, with the possibility of fruit and vegetables rotting on the vines and trees because of a shortage of migrant farm workers throughout the country, the Bush administration wants to quietly pick up where Congress failed by removing barriers for foreigners, mostly from Mexico, to come and do the labor-intensive field work Americans don't want.
After turning their backs on the immigrants who are already here, the administration is trying to find ways to clean up the mess and mend a broken visa system.
To allow people to come in and break their backs for low comparative wages for a short-term period of time and then just say, "I've used you, abused you and now it's time to pack your bags and skedaddle back across the border," is arrogant, unjust and discriminatory.
When the president says that this country is so grand that people want desperately to come here for work, he twists the facts and doesn't mention that these desperate people coming here to do the grunt work are who help make this country great.
President Bush and his cronies should take lessons from history, before they let the grapes that allow Two-Buck Chuck to keep its name to turn to raisins. The same hegemony and institutional racism was practiced throughout the middle chunk of the last century through Operation Wetback and the Bracero Program.
The Bracero program was a nearly 20-year quota system that encouraged Mexican workers to cross the border and work the fields and railroads, as long as they were back across the border by the end of the season or job. Mexican workers were abused by both governments who deducted chunks of their pay in the form of arbitrary taxation.
Most of those workers, who tried to sue both federal governments, never recovered their stolen pay.
Operation Wetback, a 1950s campaign of terror, was similar to the recent illegal immigrant roundups headlining the country's news. The federal government set out to snatch undocumented Mexicans from the fields and ship them back to Mexico. The Border Patrol had a military agenda of grabbing and deporting 1,000 Mexicans a day, and stopped anybody that even slightly looked like Latinos to roust them for ID.
The illegals were loaded on buses and trains and shipped to the central interior of Mexico, even though most were border residents. The only reason that scheme was stopped - but not until over one million people were transported or fled - was because regular American citizens were also being hassled and held for not having ID cards.
It sure resembles the current farm-worker and immigration situation. Let them in, work the blood from their veins and run them off without considering the human condition.
Anti-immigrant sentiments have grown immensely during the past decade over fears that they were destroying the economy. But with a tremendous shortage of workers to harvest the current crops, the economy could crumble by not letting them stay. They're damned if they do and we're damned if they don't.
When the picking was good, government instruments were quick to admonish that, if these people wanted to work here, they should do it legally. Now with a threat of empty salad bowls looming on the horizon, they want to use the same human rights violation to get their lettuce harvested.
What they fail to see is that it's an extremely bureaucratic process to migrate the "right way."
The situation is so bad that less than two percent of American farms actually use the legal process for bringing across outside labor, according to a recent Los Angeles Times article. The legal procedure is the H-2A visa program.
But because the program is so badly coordinated, farms are suffering the consequences by not getting their workers to the fields in time. It becomes a no-win situation for the farms, the workers and U.S. economy.
Following the H-2A visa program means giving these farm workers a fair paycheck. With other competitors paying their workers minimum wage, farms opt to skip the long process and save a few bucks. This, of course, screams unfairness.
If the government doesn't come through with changes, consumers can expect food prices to skyrocket. In order to provide a fair solution, "guest" workers cannot be treated like robots that can simply be turned on and off at the whims of politicians.
The situation needs to be fairly resolved before Americans find themselves wishing lettuce were as cheap as gasoline. |
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