Border Policy Is Pinching Farmers

When a government policy becomes so divorced from reality that it hurts everyone it touches and even undermines the national interest, there are usually three factors that prevent it from being scrapped: prejudice, ignorance and inertia.

U.S. immigration policy reached this point long ago. Home building, landscaping, hotel services and our food supply are all dependent on illegal labor, yet the public is so convinced that illegal immigrants are a threat to the economy that citizens monitoring border crossings with binoculars are celebrated as “Minutemen.” Efforts to bar illegal immigrants from public hospitals and schools and deprive them of government services are perennials of election season.

The consequences of this attitude are emerging in the state’s agricultural zones, where a severe shortage of farmworkers has placed a $29-billion industry at risk. Raisin growers in the Central Valley were 40,000 workers short of the 50,600 needed for the annual harvest that began in mid-August, according to Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League.

As a result, he says, half the crop was still on the vines Tuesday. After that day, unharvested fruit would not be covered by federal insurance if spoiled by rain. The rains came Wednesday. Cunha says crop losses could reach $300 million.

The Central Valley isn’t alone. At the start of the lettuce and broccoli harvest in Southern California last November, only 25% of the expected workforce showed up. No one will be surprised if the number is even lower this year.

The key to understanding this shortage is immigration policy. It would be inaccurate to call the farm sector’s reliance on illegal immigrant labor an open secret, because it’s no secret at all. “No other industry but us has stood up and said they’re using undocumented workers,” says Thomas Nassif, president and chief executive of Western Growers, an Irvine-based agriculture trade association.

That candor has helped make farming a leading target for immigration enforcement since 9/11, even though farmers say they employ only about 10% of the illegal workers in the country. Apparently, it’s easier for the Border Patrol to chase down a bus taking farmworkers to the field than to raid hotels on the Las Vegas Strip for undocumented housekeepers. It certainly causes less visible inconvenience for the consuming public.

It’s true that the border crackdown is only one factor, albeit a major factor, in the farm labor shortage. Low pay and harsh conditions certainly contribute.

“This is a disaster of the growers’ own making,” Marc Grossman, a spokesman for the United Farm Workers, told me. Despite the dearth of laborers, pay in the fields hasn’t improved much in recent years. Many workers collect scarcely more than minimum wage for brutal, backbreaking toil. Three workers may have died this summer from working in the punishing heat of the Central Valley.

Meanwhile, there’s greater competition for labor from the construction and landscaping industries, which pay $9 to $12 an hour and offer steady all-weather employment.

For their part, the growers argue that when the housing and transportation they provide is factored into the hourly wage, their pay scale is much higher than minimum wage -- although, they concede, it’s still not competitive with many of the alternatives.

For all their differences, the UFW and the growers have made common cause on immigration. The vehicle is a bill labeled AgJobs, which was first introduced in Congress in 2003.

AgJobs, which is sponsored by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), has two main provisions. One would give temporary legal residency to any person who has worked at least 100 hours in the agricultural sector in the 18 months prior to the bill’s passage, regardless of his or her immigration status. The residency would extend to the worker’s immediate family. Anyone who worked an additional 360 days in agriculture over the following three to six years could apply for a green card. The bill’s supporters say that as many as 500,000 workers in California and elsewhere would be eligible.

The second provision would streamline the H-2A visa process, which is currently the only legal way for growers to import a foreign temporary workforce. The process today is ridiculously complicated, involving hundreds of pages of required documentation and multitudinous layers of bureaucracy.

Passage of AgJobs would mean acknowledging the truth, that immigrant labor is indispensable to the farm industry. It would give growers access to a stable workforce and up to six years to build the housing they’re required to provide workers under H-2A rules. It would enable illegal workers to come up from underground, relieving them of the constant fear of exposure that makes them vulnerable to abuse by everyone from “coyotes,” or human smugglers, to employers. It’s supported by an impressive coalition of growers, unions, and farmworker advocates.

So what’s happened? When the measure came up for a Senate vote in May as a rider to the Iraq appropriations bill, it got 53 votes -- a majority, but not enough under Senate rules to open debate on its merits.

Supporters say they’re encouraged by the tally, but they’re also worried that the immigration issue is becoming hopelessly entangled in public concerns about terrorism and unemployment fears. “The environment has grown worse,” says Craig Regelbrugge, co-chairman of an agriculture coalition promoting the bill.

AgJobs could jump-start a rational discussion of illegal immigration, and create a fair and practical labor policy for a crucial segment of the U.S. economy. But so far, prejudice, ignorance and inertia are still carrying the day.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com.