Depending on Immigrants--and Self-Deception : Labor: Remind those who would ban them at the border that they do jobs others won’t.

On a recent, exceedingly fine day I found myself gazing out the window at the hillside behind my house, once green and lush with nopal cactus and green tumbleweed balls, then denuded and carefully replanted with “native” shrubbery, including “wild” fennel and papery purple and white statice.

Part of my purview on this day included a team of men methodically weeding among the cultivated plantings. I thought to myself that there were worse things a body could be doing on such a fine day than working on a hillside in the sun. When the lunch truck rumbled up the street and parked, sending the intoxicating scent of carnitas wafting through the air, some of the men broke into song as they trudged down the hill to lunch. I wished I spoke Spanish, so that I could have understood the lyrics.

The sun and the song and the fresh smells combined to drape the scene with a diaphanous, rosy romanticism, a rich golden haze that made it seem like something only pure and good.

And what is bad about men working the beautiful Orange County outdoors, and the opportunity to take a break from the vertebrae-straining bending the job entails to enjoy freshly fried carnitas? I thought of strawberries, which enjoyed an unprecedented early debut this year, and the folks who pick them, making it possible for you and me to do no more than visit our local market to pay a pittance for what is surely one of God’s lagniappes for man. I think of the “nannies” I see at the playground where I take my little son, caring for others’ Most Precious Possessions for the princely sum of $400 per month, including, I have been reminded, room and board.

Mostly what I think of is this: Just what do all the nattering anti-immigration blowhards think we would do if these hard-working people were not streaming into our region and taking these jobs? Would the legions of bored teen-agers in the mall-supplied gangsta garb stampede into low-paying landscape maintenance jobs? I think not. Do most people know that field workers only recently got the right to have sanitary facilities and fresh drinking water, and then only when these minimal human needs were mandated by a court? And to me, room and board included sounds a lot like 24-hour on-call servitude at near-slave wages.

These immigrant workers, legal or not, live in and with conditions that are so primitive that they lie beyond the ken of most of us, even while we demand from them cultivated greenbelts and daily-fresh strawberries and child care, all at bargain-basement prices.

I like to imagine that just for a day or two, all our immigrant labor, legal or no, could be somehow spirited from the environs. Then, I tell myself, all those presently blinded will see! It’s an evil, tangled web we have woven, the popular denunciation of those on whom we are absolutely dependent.