Addicted to illegal workers?

Re “A town that wants illegal immigrants,” Current, Feb. 11

Although I agree with Gregory Rodriguez’s column that the recent freeze in the citrus industry hits farmworkers the hardest and that the government desperately needs a coherent guest-worker program, it seems wrong to link the two issues. My family has been in the citrus industry for more than 30 years, and I’m a part-owner of an independent citrus company in Exeter, just 10 miles from Lindsay. It’s sad to say, but in the short term this freeze, if anything, will alleviate the labor shortage: If an industry has too few workers, taking away jobs will solve the problem, not worsen it. Rodriguez implies that the effects of the freeze could have been mitigated if there were just more workers available to pick the fruit before the freeze. This isn’t really true. It was not a shortage of pickers that limited what we could get off the trees, but the capacity of our warehouses.

Rodriguez states that race does not appear to play a role in Lindsay’s approach to the disaster, but the statistics he quotes seem to argue just the opposite. Would a town that was 78% white with a City Council 60% white take such a generous approach to illegal immigrants devastated by the freeze? Sadly, I think not.

W.B. PESCOSOLIDO

Exeter, Calif.

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Of course, Lindsay finds it difficult to get along without illegal immigrants, like cocaine addicts find it difficult to get along without cocaine. Cheap illegal labor is a sort of addictive economic drug. Communities and employers become so dependent on it that they lose their ability to be innovative or operative within a legal market. And like drug addicts, these communities, unable to beat their addiction, eventually find themselves falling on the public dole in some way.

GARY THORNTON

Montebello