AgJobs Senate Floor Statement by U.S.
Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla)
April 18, 2006
Mr. President, Edmundo Garcia said he had heard that the new Bush immigration plan, which would grant work visas to millions of illegal immigrants inside the United States and to others who can prove they have a job, was `amnesty,' and he wondered why he was arrested.''
He said he would try to cross [the border from Mexico to the U.S. through the Sonoran Desert] again in a few days.
This quote from the New York Times on May 23, 2004, shows just how bad things have gotten since the administration's initial immigration policy proposal was announced.
The New York Times article goes on to say:
Apprehensions of crossers in the desert south of Tucson have jumped 60 percent over the previous year.
Nearly 300,000 people were caught trying to enter the U.S. through the desert border since last October 1st (that's October 2003).''
It continues:
After a four-year drop, apprehensions which the Border Patrol uses to measure human smuggling are up 30 percent over last year along the entire southern border, with over 660,000 people detained from October 1st through the end of April.
There are an estimated 8 to 12 million illegal immigrants in this country, with about 1 million new illegal aliens coming into this country every year. Legal immigration is even at unprecedented levels about five times the traditional levels. We now have about 1.2 million legal immigrants coming into this country each year, as opposed to an average of about 250,000 legal immigrants before 1976.
S. 359, the AgJOBS bill, could offer amnesty to at least 800,000 more illegal
aliens, and if they all bring family members, which they would be eligible to do, it could be up to 3 million more, according to Numbers USA.
I greatly respect my friend and colleague, the Senator from Idaho, Mr. Craig, and I understand he has many cosponsors for his bill, but I firmly believe S. 359 has some major flaws and is not the way to remedy our problem with illegal immigration .
Even though there are certain criteria these illegal aliens must meet to qualify for temporary work status and eventual citizenship under this bill, it still rewards them by allowing them to stay in this country and work rather than penalizing them for breaking the law this is amnesty.
I also agree with my colleague from Texas, Senator Cornyn, the chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, who said in Tuesday's Congress Daily when asked about the supplemental bill H.R. 1268, said that he did not want it to ``be a magnet for other unrelated immigration proposals . . . regular order is the best way. . . .''
I agree with my colleague and think we should focus on the supplemental and debate immigration reform separately.
Furthermore, in section 2, paragraph 7, the AgJOBS bill defines a workday as ``any day in which the individual is employed one or more hours in agriculture.''
In order for an alien to apply for temporary work status, section 101, subsection A, subparagraph A states that the aliens ``must establish that they have performed agricultural employment in the United States for at least 575 hours or 100 work days, whichever is less, during any 12 consecutive months. .....''
So if a workday is defined as working at least 1 hour and the alien only has to work 100 work days in a year to qualify for temporary status under the AgJOBS bill, then illegal aliens only have to find some kind of agricultural work, and not necessarily be paid, for 100 hours, or merely 2 weeks, in a year in order to stay temporarily, while robbing Americans of these jobs.
An article from May 18, 2004, by Frank Gaffney, Jr., from the Washington Times entitled ``Stealth Amnesty'' states that once an illegal alien has established lawful temporary residency, ``they can stay in the U.S. indefinitely while applying for permanent resident status.''
``From there it is a matter of time before they can become citizens, so long as they work in the agricultural sector for 675 hours over the next 6 years.''
Furthermore, in referring to the REAL ID Act, which was attached to the supplemental in the House, and I believe is true reform, another article from the week of April 6, appeared in the Washington Times stating:
..... REAL ID is a bill that will strengthen homeland security, while Mr. Craig's AgJOBS bill will not.
One more article in the Washington Times, again by Frank Gaffney, Jr., from April 5 refers to the REAL ID Act as well as AgJOBS says:
The REAL ID legislation is aimed at denying future terrorists the ability exploited by the September 11, 2001, hijackers namely, to hold numerous valid driver's licenses, which they used to gain access to airports and their targeted aircraft.
It is no small irony, therefore, that the presence of the REAL ID provisions on the military's supplemental funding bill is being cited by the Senate parliamentarian as grounds for Senator Larry Craig, Idaho Republican, to try to attach to it legislation that would help eviscerate what passes for restrictions on illegal immigration .
The article continues:
The agriculture sector of the US economy needs cheap labor.
So let's legalize the presence in this country of anyone who can claim to have once worked for a little more than three months in that sector.
We must not reward lawbreakers especially while we have so many people coming to this country legally.
Last summer, I had an intern in my office from Rwanda. She fled during the genocide in 1994. She then came to this country as a refugee and became a legal permanent resident. It took her a year to get all her paperwork for becoming a legal resident and she will probably have to wade through similar bureaucracy to become a citizen as well. It frustrates me that people like her follow the rules and have to wait in the lines and wait for all the paperwork to be processed, while the illegal aliens can sneak into our country, and then, if they do apply for legal status, they slow down the process for those who came here legally. Not only does AgJOBS reward lawbreakers, it also robs many Americans of jobs they are willing to do.
Roy Beck from Numbers USA in his testimony on March 24, 2004, before the Subcommittee on Immigration , Border Security and Claims, quoted Alan Greenspan from February of last year as saying that America has an ``oversupply of low-skilled, low-educated workers.'' In fact, according to Mr. Beck's testimony, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of unemployed Americans includes a majority of workers without a high school diploma.
Basically, we have a great supply of lower educated American workers without jobs, while ironically, the main purpose of the AgJOBS bill is to bring in low-educated, low-skilled foreign workers for jobs that these Americans are able and willing to fill.
A recent article from March 31 of this year in the San Diego Union-Tribune entitled ``Importing a Peasant Class'', written by Jerry Kammer, emphasizes this point by saying:
Nearly two decades after a sweeping amnesty for illegal immigrants [referring to the 1986 Amnesty] gave Gerardo Jimenez a ticket out of a San Diego County avocado orchard, he worries that the unyielding tide of low-wage workers from Latin America might pull the economic rug out from under his feet.
Jimenez, who is from Mexico and supervises a drywall crew that worked all winter remodeling an office building three blocks from the White House says, ``There are too many people coming.''
The article goes on to say:
Jimenez's concern reflects an ambivalence about immigration among established immigrants in America.
It also challenges a key assumption of President Bush's proposal for a massive new guest-worker program: that the United States has a dearth of low-skill workers.
This is not true, we do not have a dearth of low-skill workers.
Not only does S. 359 keep able Americans from performing these jobs; it also drives down wages and stifles innovation and technology for these jobs.
The same San Diego Union-Tribune article I just quoted from continues saying:
In Atlanta, house painter Moises Milano says competition for jobs is so stiff among immigrants that house painters' wages have been flat since he came to the United States in the late 1980.
They're still $9 an hour, he said, which would mean they've actually fallen significantly when adjusted for inflation.
And yet many more aspiring house painters arrive every day from Latin America.
Similar concerns can be heard throughout low-wage industries that Latino immigrants have come to dominate during recent decades, including housekeeping, landscaping, janitorial, chicken processing, meat packing, restaurants, hotels and fast food.
The article goes on to say:
Jimenez says his company competes for contracts against subcontractors using illegal workers who are prepared to work for less and who don't expect health insurance, overtime or other employment benefits.
``It puts pressure on his employer to cut labor costs, he said.''
Jimenez explains why the migrants come and how it hurts current immigrants: ``The migrants come because of hunger, because of necessity . . . but I would benefit if someone imposed order,'' he says. ``My work would be worth more.''
Jimenez says that he won't be able to compete with companies that hire illegal workers so that they can pay lower wages.
Not only are workers like Jimenez facing tough competition from companies who hire illegals, but a GAO study from 1988 found that other fields, such as cleaning office buildings, were also experiencing lower wages and more competition as a result of foreign workers.
Cleaning office buildings used to pay a decent wage, however as more foreign workers entered the field, wages, benefits and working conditions began to collapse.
Other labor-intensive fields, such as the construction and the meatpacking industry, have also experienced a drop in pay after an influx of foreign workers. By allowing employers to flood the
[Page: S3803] GPO's PDF
labor market with foreign workers in these sectors, wages and working conditions have gone down drastically and made these jobs much less attractive to American workers; while making them much more attractive to alien workers.
As for stifling technological advances, according to a February 9, 2004, article appearing in National Review:
the huge supply of low-wage illegal aliens encourages American farmers to lag technologically behind farmers in other countries.
The article continues:
Raisin production in California still requires that grapes be cut off by hand and manually turned on the drying tray.
In other countries, farmers use a labor-saving technique called drying on the vine.
A cutoff of the illegal-alien flow would encourage American farmers to adopt many of these technological innovations, and come up with new ones.
Another, and possibly more important problem with S. 359, is the risk it poses to our homeland security. It has some of the same loopholes that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, IRCA, contained.
It also overwhelms the already burdened immigration system, not to mention that there are no criminal or terrorist records for these people. For example, an Egyptian illegal immigrant named Mahmud Abouhalima came to America on a tourist visa in 1985. The visa expired in 1986, but Abouhalima stayed here, working illegally as a cab driver.
Abouhalima received permanent residency, a green card, in 1988, after winning amnesty under the 1986 IRCA law. Although he had never worked in agriculture in the United States, Abouhalima acquired legal status through the special agricultural workers program--which is essentially what the AgJobs bill does. Once he had become legalized, Abouhalima was able to travel freely to Afghanistan. He received combat training during several trips there. Abouhalima used his amnesty/legalization and his terrorist training as a lead organizer of the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center and other New York landmarks.
The special agricultural worker amnesty program enacted as part of the 1986 Amnesty saw many ineligible illegal aliens fraudulently apply for, and successfully receive, amnesty. Up to two-thirds of illegal aliens receiving amnesty under that program had submitted fraudulent applications, just like Abouhalima. We cannot afford to allow ourselves to be vulnerable to terrorists by allowing these people to stay in our country. I want to work with my colleague to address this problem of illegal immigration .
Over the last century, several Presidential and congressionally mandated Commissions including the 1907 Roosevelt Commission on Country Life to the 1990 Barbara Jordan Commission on Immigration Reform have been appointed to study immigration to the United States. These seven Commissions each possessing different mandates, membership makeup, studies and historical context in which their work was performed had some similar findings including: U.S. policy should actively discourage the dependence of any industry on foreign workers.
Dependence on a foreign agricultural labor force is especially problematic because of the seasonal nature of the work, which leads to high un- and under-employment and results in the inefficient use of labor.
Strict enforcement of immigration and labor laws is the key to a successful immigration policy that benefits the nation. Unfortunately, AgJOBS violates each of these principles.
It ensures the dependence of the agricultural industry on foreign workers by eliminating any possibility that wages and working conditions in agriculture will improve sufficiently to attract U.S. workers, whether citizens or lawful permanent residents.
AgJOBS actually reduces wages statutorily by freezing the required wage rate for new foreign workers, known as H-2A nonimmigrants, at its January 1, 2003, level for 3 years. In Oklahoma it is currently $7.89.
It also actually discourages agricultural employers from pursuing innovations, such as mechanization, that would reduce their reliance on seasonal labor.
AgJOBS guarantees employers an ``indentured'' labor force for at last the first 6 years after enactment. Employers can pay as little as minimum wage while the newly amnestied workers have no choice but to accept whatever the employer offers them since they are required to continue working in agriculture in order to get a green card.
Additionally, AgJOBS requires the American taxpayer to foot the bill for maintaining this large, seasonal workforce by allowing: Illegal aliens who apply for amnesty under AgJOBS to receive taxpayer-funded counsel from Legal Services Corporation to assist them with filling out their applications; the amnestied aliens to be eligible for unemployment insurance benefits if they are unable to find other unskilled work during the off-season, the amnestied aliens to use publicly funded services like education and emergency health care this is almost free since many of these aliens have artificially low wages thus making their tax contributions extremely low.
Finally, AgJOBS does not contain any provisions to tighten enforcement of U.S. immigration or labor laws. In fact, by rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty, AgJOBS will encourage even more illegal immigration .
By the time the amnestied aliens are released from ``indentured servitude'' under AgJOBS, agricultural employers will have access to a whole new population of illegal-alien workers and the cycle will be well on its way to repeating itself, just as it did after the ``one-time-only'' amnesty for agricultural workers in 1986.
I also believe both the REAL ID Act, sponsored by my colleague in the House, Congressman Sensenbrenner, as well as a bill I supported in the last Congress, are sound ways to strengthen our immigration system. The REAL ID Act would make it more difficult for people who are violating our laws by being in our country illegally, as well as engaging in terrorist activities, to stay in the United States. Unfortunately, I was forced to vote against the intelligence bill in December because the provisions that are in the REAL ID Act were excluded from the intelligence bill.
One such provision in the current REAL ID Act has to do with a 3.5-mile gap in a border fence between San Diego and Tijuana. People are able to come and go as they please. This is where many illegal immigrants are coming through; some of them could even be terrorists.
Apparently, this gap has been left open because of a maritime succulent shrub, which is the environment in which two pairs of endangered birds live. These two pairs of birds, the vireo and the flycatcher, might be harassed--not killed--but harassed if the fence is completed.
I checked with the U.S. Geological Survey and found that there are an estimated 2,000 vireos and 1,000 flycatchers in existence today, and at the most, not building the fence prevents two pairs of birds from being harassed. Is it better to harass two pairs of birds or leave this 3.5-mile gap open for terrorists or other law-breakers to come through? I assume that not building the fence, leaving it open for aliens to trample on this environment, the home to these birds causes more harassment than actually building a fence.
Another provision in the REAL ID Act is the requirement for proof of lawful presence in the United States. This requirement applies to immigration law provisions passed in 1996, which I supported.
The temporary license requirement, including a requirement that the license term should expire on the same date as a visa or other temporary lawful presence-authorizing document, is in the REAL ID Act. This means if you are here on a document--such as a visa--and it expires, your driver's license should expire at the same time. Under current law, this is not the case
The REAL ID Act requires official identification to expire on the same date as a person's visa or other presence-authorizing document. Electronic confirmation by various State departments of motor vehicles to validate other States' driver's licenses is another important item in the REAL ID Act. Had Virginia officials referenced the Florida records of Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers and masterminds behind 9/11, when he was stopped in Virginia, it is likely they would have discovered that his license was not current. The REAL ID Act will make it difficult for instances such as this to take place.
[Page: S3804] GPO's PDF
While I strongly support the steps taken in the REAL ID Act to strengthen our immigration laws, I remain vigilant, and look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure that American citizens' individual liberties are not infringed upon.
I also want to be aware of and oppose efforts to explicitly create a national ID card which could contain all of a person's personal information.
Finally, in the 108th Congress, I cosponsored S. 1906, the Homeland Security Enhancement Act of 2003, which was introduced by my colleague from Alabama, Senator Sessions, and my former colleague from Georgia, Senator Miller, and was also cosponsored by my colleague from Idaho, Senator Craig. S. 1906 would give our law enforcement and immigration and border officers the tools and funding they need to do their jobs. More specifically, S. 1906 would: clarify for law enforcement officers that they have the legal authority to enforce immigration violations while carrying out their routine duties; increase the amount of information regarding deportable illegal aliens entered into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, making the information more readily available to state and local officials; supply additional facilities and beds to retain criminal aliens once they have been apprehended, instead of releasing them, which occurs quite frequently; require the Federal Government to either take illegal aliens into custody or pay the locality or State to detain them, instead of telling those officials to release the aliens because no one is available to take custody; require that criminal aliens be retained until deportation under the Institutional Removal Program, so that they are not released back into the community; mandate that States only give driver's licenses to legal immigrants and make the license expire the same day the alien's permission to be in the country expires.
In conclusion, let's work to improve and enforce our laws and not reward those who break them.
I ask unanimous consent that several pertinent articles be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the New York Times, May 23, 2004]
BORDER DESERT PROVES DEADLY FOR MEXICANS
(By Timothy Egan)
At the bottleneck of human smuggling here in the Sonoran Desert, illegal immigrants are dying in record numbers as they try to cross from Mexico into the United States in the wake of a new Bush administration amnesty proposal that is being perceived by some migrants as a magnet to cross.
``The season of death,'' as Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner in charge of the Border Patrol, calls the hot months, has only just begun, and already 61 people have died in the Arizona border region since last Oct. 1, according to the Mexican Interior Ministry--triple the pace of the previous year.
The Border Patrol, which counts only bodies that it processes, says 43 people have died near the Arizona border since the start of its fiscal year on Oct. 1, more than in any other year in the same period.
Leon Stroud, a Border Patrol agent who is part of a squad that has the dual job of arresting illegal immigrants and trying to save their lives, said he had seen 34 bodies in the last year. In Border Patrol parlance, a dead car and a dead migrant are the same thing--a ``10-7''--but Mr. Stroud said he had never gotten used to the loss of life.
``The hardest thing was, I sat with this 15-year-old kid next to the body of his dad,'' said Mr. Stroud, a Texan who speaks fluent Spanish. ``His dad had been a cook. He was too fat to be trying to cross this border. We built a fire and I tried to console him. It was tough.''
If the pace keeps up, even with new initiatives to limit border crossings by using unmanned drones and Blackhawk helicopters in the air and beefed-up patrols on the ground, this will be the deadliest year ever to cross the nation's busiest smuggling corridor. The 154 deaths in the Border Patrol's Tucson and Yuma sectors last year set a record.
``This is unprecedented,'' said the Rev. John Fife, a Presbyterian minister in Tucson who is active in border humanitarian efforts. ``Ten years ago there were almost no deaths on the southern Arizona border. What they've done is created this gauntlet of death. It's Darwinian--only the strongest survive.''
For years, deaths of people trying to cross the border usually occurred at night on highways near urban areas, killed by cars. But now, because urban entries in places like San Diego and El Paso have been nearly sealed by fences, technology and agents, illegal immigrants have been forced to try to cross here in southern Arizona, one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
They die from the sun, baking on the prickled floor of the Sonoran Desert, where ground temperatures reach 130 degrees before the first day of summer. They die freezing, higher up in the cold rocks of the Baboquivari Mountains on moonless nights. They die from bandits who prey on them, in cars that break down on them, and from hearts that give out on them at a young age.
The mountainous Sonoran Desert, between Yuma in the west and Nogales in the east, is the top smuggling entry point along the entire 1,951-mile line with Mexico, the Border Patrol says. Through the middle of May, apprehensions of crossers in the desert south of Tucson had jumped 60 percent over the previous year. Nearly 300,000 people were caught trying to enter the United States through the desert border since last Oct. 1.
After a four-year drop, apprehensions--which the Border Patrol uses to measure human smuggling--are up 30 percent over last year along the entire southern border, with 660,390 people detained from Oct. 1 through the end of April, federal officials said.
The crossing here, over a simple barbed-wire fence, is followed by a walk of two or three days, up to 50 miles on ancient trails through a desert wilderness, to reach the nearest road, on the Tohono O'odham Nation Indian Reservation, a wedge of desert the size of Connecticut that is overrun with illegal immigrants, or on adjacent federal park or wildlife land. Most people start off with no more than two gallons of water, weighing almost 17 pounds, in plastic jugs. In recent days, with daytime temperatures over 100 degrees in the desert, a person needed a gallon of water just to survive walking five miles.
The desert is littered with garbage--empty plastic jugs, discarded clothes, toilet paper.
``My feet hurt and I'm thirsty, but I will try again after a rest,'' said Edmundo Sae 4nz García, 28, who was apprehended on the reservation one morning near the end of his journey. His toes were swollen and blistered. He walked in cowboy boots. After being fingerprinted for security, he will be sent back to Mexico, agents said.
Mr. García said he had heard that the new Bush immigration plan, which would grant work visas to millions of illegal immigrants inside the United States and to others who can prove they have a job, was ``amnesty,'' and he wondered why he was arrested. He said he would try to cross again in a few days.
``It's like catch-and-release fishing,'' Mr. Stroud, the Border Patrol agent, said with a shrug after helping Mr. García with his blisters. ``One week, I arrested the same guy three times. If I dwell on it, it can be frustrating.''
Agents and groups opposed to open borders say the spike in crossings and deaths are the fault of the Bush proposal, which is stalled in Congress and unlikely to be acted on this year. But it has created a stir in Mexico, they say.
``They've dangled this carrot, and as a result apprehensions in Arizona are just spiking beyond belief,'' said T. J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents about 9,000 agents. ``The average field agent is just mystified by the administration's throwing in the towel on this.''
Mr. Bonner, who is not related to the border commissioner, said the people were crossing in huge numbers, even at the high risk of dying in the desert, because ``they're trying to get in line for the big lottery we've offered them.''
With an estimated 8 million to 12 million immigrants in this country illegally--and only a handful of prosecutions of employers who hire them--the southern border is more broken now than at any time in recent history, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group opposed to increased immigration .
``We've created an incentive to take foolish risks,'' Mr. Krikorian said. ``In effect, we're saying if you run this gauntlet and can get over here, you're home free.''
Bush administration officials say there is only anecdotal evidence, from field agents, that their proposal has caused the spike in crossings. They point to a new $10 million border initiative and indications in recent weeks that apprehensions have leveled off as evidence that they are getting the upper hand on the Arizona border. It is the last uncontrolled part of the line between Mexico and the United States, they said.
``Unfortunately, there have always been deaths on the border,'' said Mario Villareal, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in Washington.
It was 3 years ago this month that 14 people died trying to walk cross the desert near this small tribal hamlet, dying of heat-related stress in what the poet Luis Alberto Urrea called ``the largest death event in border history.'' Mr. Urrea is the author of ``The Devil's Highway'' (Little, Brown and Company), an account of the crossing and border policy.
He wrote that the Sonoran Desert here ``is known as the most terrible place on earth,'' where people die ``of heat, thirst and misadventure.''
To curb deaths, the American government has been running an advertising campaign in Mexico, warning people of the horrors.
``The message is, `No mas cruces en la frontera,' `no more crosses on the border,' '' Commissioner Bonner said in unveiling the
[Page: S3805] GPO's PDF
new plan earlier this month in Texas. He said 80 percent of the deaths in a given year happen between May and August.
The government has also increased staffing of Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue Units, called Borstar, which deploys emergency medical technicians like Mr. Stroud, to assist people found in desperate condition in the desert.
The publicity campaign seems to have had little effect, say border agents and illegal immigrants.
Ramínez Bermúdez, 26, walked for four days in 100-degree heat, and said he knew full well what he was getting into. He had been caught four times before his apprehension this week, he said.
Though he has a 25-acre farm in southern Mexico, Mr. Bermúdez said he could earn up to $200 a day picking cherries in California. He was distressed, though, at getting caught and at the failure to meet a coyote, or smuggler, who had agreed to pick him up and members of his group for $1,200 each.
Mr. Stroud has developed a ritual to cope with the increased number of bodies he has seen among the mesquite bushes and barrel cactus of the Sonoran. He has seen children as young as 10, their bodies bloated after decomposing in the heat, and mothers wailing next to them.
``I say a little prayer for every body,'' he said. ``You try not to let it get to you. But every one of these bodies is somebody's son or daughter, somebody's mother or father.''
--
[From the Washington Times, May 18, 2004]
STEALTH AMNESTY
(By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.)
The issue that has the potential to be the most volatile politically in the 2004 election is not Iraq, the economy or same-sex marriages. At this writing, it would appear to be the wildly unpopular idea of granting illegal aliens what amounts to amnesty--the opportunity to stay in this country, work, secure social services, become citizens and, in some jurisdictions, perhaps vote even prior to becoming citizens.
So radioactive is this idea across party, demographic, class and geographic lines that President Bush has wisely decided effectively to shelve the immigration reform plan he announced with much fanfare earlier this year. With the lowest job approval ratings of his presidency, the last thing he needs is a legislative brawl that will at best fracture, and at worst massively alienate his base.
It appears unlikely to help him much with Americans of other stripes, either. Significant numbers of independents and Democrats (although, to be sure, not John Kerry's left-wing constituency)--even Hispanic ones--feel as conservative Republicans do: Rewarding those who violate our immigration statutes is corrosive to the rule of law, on net detrimental to our economy and a serious national security vulnerability.
Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, one of his most loyal friends in the U.S. Senate, Republican conservative Larry Craig of Idaho, is poised to saddle the president's re-election bid with just such a divisive initiative: S. 1645, the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act of 2003 (better known as the AgJobs bill). AgJobs is, in some ways, even worse than the president's plan for temporary workers. While most experts disagree, at least Mr. Bush insists that his initiative will not amount to amnesty for illegal aliens.
No such demurral is possible about S. 1645. By the legislation's own terms, an illegal alien will be turned into ``an alien lawfully admitted for temporary residence,'' provided they had managed to work unlawfully in an agricultural job in the United States for a minimum of 100 hours--in other words, for just 2 1/2 workweeks--during the 18 months prior to August 31, 2003.
Once so transformed, they can stay in the U.S. indefinitely while applying for permanent resident status. From there, it is a matter of time before they can become citizens, so long as they work in the agricultural sector for 675 hours over the next six years.
The Craig bill would confer this amnesty not only on farmworking illegal aliens who are in this country--estimates of those eligible run to more than 800,000. It would also extend the opportunity to those who otherwise qualified but had previously left the United States. No one knows how many would fall in this category and want to return as legal workers. But, a safe bet is that there are hundreds of thousands of them.
If any were needed, S. 1645 offers a further incentive to the illegals: Your family can stay, as well. Alternatively, if they are not with you, you can bring them in, too--cutting in line ahead of others who made the mistake of abiding by, rather than ignoring, our laws. And just in case the illegal aliens are daunted by the prospect of filling out such paperwork as would be required to effect the changes in status authorized by the AgJobs bill, S. 1645 offers still more: free counsel from, ironically, the bane of conservatives like Sen. Larry Craig and many of his Republican co-sponsors--the highly controversial, leftist and taxpayer-underwritten Legal Services Corp.
Needless to say, such provisions seem unlikely to be well-received by the majority of law abiding Americans. Nor, for that matter, do they appear to have much prospect of passage in the less-self-destructive House of Representatives.
Yet, if Mr. Craig presses for action on his legislation, the Senate leadership might be unable to spare either President Bush or itself the predictable blow-back: As of today, the Senate Web site indicates the Idahoan has 61 cosponsors, two more than are needed to cut off debate and bring the legislation to a vote; 11 more than would be needed for its passage.
In short, thanks to intense pressure from an unusual coalition forged by the agricultural industry and illegal alien advocacy groups, the Senate might endorse the sort of election altering initiative that precipitates voter response--like that made famous by the movie ``Network News'': ``I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.'' Some, perhaps including the normally shrewd Mr. Craig, may calculate that such voters will have nowhere to go if the alternative to Republican control of the White House and Senate would be Democrats who are, if anything, even less responsible when it comes to amnesty (and social services, voting rights, etc.) for illegal aliens.
The truth of the matter, though--as President Bush's political operatives apparently concluded after they trotted out their amnesty-light initiative last January--is voters don't have to vote Democratic to change Washington's political line-up. They just have to stay home on Election Day. And S. 1645 could give them powerful reason to do so.
--
[From the New York Times, March 22, 2004]
IN FLORIDA GROVES, CHEAP LABOR MEANS MACHINES
(By Eduardo Porter)
IMMOKALEE, FLA.--Chugging down a row of trees, the pair of canopy shakers in Paul Meador's orange grove here seem like a cross between a bulldozer and a hairbrush, their hungry steel bristles working through the tree crowns as if untangling colossal heads of hair.
In under 15 minutes, the machines shake loose 36,000 pounds of oranges from 100 trees, catch the fruit and drop it into a large storage car. ``This would have taken four pickers all day long,'' Mr. Meador said.
Canopy shakers are still an unusual sight in Florida's orange groves. Most of the crop is harvested by hand, mainly by illegal Mexican immigrants. Nylon sacks slung across their backs, perched atop 16-foot ladders, they pluck oranges at a rate of 70 to 90 cents per 90-pound box, or less than $75 a day.
But as globalization creeps into the groves, it is threatening to displace the workers. Facing increased competition from Brazil and a glut of oranges on world markets, alarmed growers here have been turning to labor-saving technology as their best hope for survival.
``The Florida industry has to reduce costs to stay in business,'' said Everett Loukonen, agribusiness manager for the Barron Collier Company, which uses shakers to harvest about half of the 40.5 million pounds of oranges reaped annually from its 10,000 acres in southwestern Florida. ``Mechanical harvesting is the only available way to do that today.''
Global competition is pressing American farmers on many fronts. American raisins are facing competition from Chile and Turkey. For fresh tomatoes, the challenge comes from Mexico. China, whose Fuji apples have displaced Washington's Golden Delicious from most Asian markets--and whose apple juice has swamped the United States--is cutting into American farmers' markets for garlic, broccoli and a host of other crops.
So even while President Bush advances a plan to invite legal guest workers into American fields, farmers for the first time in a generation are working to replace hand laborers with machines.
``The rest of the world hand-picks everything, but their wage rates are a fraction of ours,'' said Galen Brown, who led the mechanical harvesting program at the Florida Department of Citrus until his retirement last year. Lee Simpson, a raisin grape grower in California's San Joaquin Valley, is more blunt. ``The cheap labor,'' he said, ``isn't cheap enough.''
Mr. Simpson and other growers have devised a system that increases yields and cuts the demand for workers during the peak harvest time by 90 percent; rather than cutting grapes by hand and laying them out to dry, the farmers let the fruit dry on the vine before it is harvested mechanically.
Some fruit-tree growers in Washington State have introduced a machine that knocks cherries off the tree onto a conveyor belt; they are trying to perfect a similar system for apples. Strawberry growers in Ventura County, Calif., developed a mobile conveyor belt to move full strawberry boxes from the fields to storage bins, cutting demand for workers by a third. And producers of leaf lettuce and spinach for bag mixes have introduced mechanical cutters.
American farmers have been dragging machines into their fields at least since the mid-19th century, when labor shortages during the Civil War drove a first wave of mechanical harvesting. Mechanization grew apace for the following 100-plus years, taking over the harvesting of crops including wheat, corn, cotton and sugar cane.
But not all crops were easily adaptable to machines. Whole fruit and vegetables--the most lucrative and labor intensive crops, employing four of every five seasonal field workers--require delicate handling. Mechanization sometimes meant rearranging the fields, planting new types of vines or trees and retrofitting packing plants.
Rather than make such investments, farmers mostly focused on lobbying government
[Page: S3806] GPO's PDF
for easier access to inexpensive labor. California growers, the biggest fruit and vegetable producers in the nation, persuaded the government to admit Mexican workers during World War I. Later, from 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million Mexican farm workers were admitted into the country under the bracero guest-worker program.
Investment in technology generally happened when the immigrant spigot was shut. After the bracero program ended and some farm wages began to rise, scientists at the University of California at Davis began work on both a machine to harvest tomatoes mechanically and a tomato better suited to mechanical harvesting.
By 1970, the number of tomato-harvest jobs had been cut by two-thirds. But the tomato harvester's success proved to be a kiss of death for mechanical harvesting. In 1979, the farm worker advocacy group California Rural Legal Assistance, with support from the United Farm Workers union of Cesar Chavez, sued U.C. Davis, charging that it was using public money for research that displaced workers and helped only big growers.
The lawsuit was eventually settled. But even before that, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter's agriculture secretary, Bob Bergland, declared that the government would no longer finance research projects intended to replace ``an adequate and willing work force with machines.'' Today, the Agricultural Research Service employs just one agricultural engineer: Donald Peterson, a longtime researcher at the Appalachian Fruit Research Station in Kearneysville, W. Va.
``At one time I was told to keep a low profile and not to publicize what I was doing,'' Mr. Peterson said.
As the government pulled out, growers lost interest as well, refocusing on Congress instead. In 1986, farmers were instrumental in winning passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized nearly three million illegal immigrants--more than a third under a special program for agriculture.
Farmers' investments in labor-saving technology all but froze, and gains in labor productivity slowed. From 1986 to 1999, farm labor inputs fell 2.4 percent, after a drop of 35 percent in the preceding 14 years. Meanwhile, farmers' capital investments fell 46.7 percent from their peak in 1980 through 1999.
About 45 vegetable and fruit crops planted over 3.6 million acres of land, and worth about $13 billion at the farm gate, are still harvested by hand, by a labor force made up mostly of illegal immigrants. On average, farm workers earned $6.18 an hour, less than half the average wage for private, nonfarm workers, in 1998, the year of the Labor Department's most recent survey of agricultural workers.
Florida's orange groves have reflected the broader trends. In the 1980's, a 20-year research effort into mechanical harvesting ground to a halt. With frosts upstate taking 200,000 acres out of production, orange prices soared and the demand for labor fell.
But as is often the case in agriculture, farmers overreacted to the market's strength, flocking to plant groves among the vegetable patches, pastures and swamps in the southwestern part of the state. By the early 1990's, the market looked poised for a glut. With the prospect of bumper crops in Brazil, where harvesting costs are about one-third as high as in Florida, a crisis loomed--driving orange growers back into technology's embrace.
In 1995, the growers decided to plow $1 million to $1.5 million a year into research in mechanical harvesting. By the 1999-2000 harvest, the growers had achieved their technological breakthrough, with four different harvesting machines working commercially. Last year, machines harvested 17,000 acres of the state's 600,000 acres planted in juice oranges, said Fritz M. Roka, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida.
``Mechanical harvesting is the biggest change in the Florida citrus industry since we switched to aluminum ladders,'' said Will Elliott, general manager of Coe-Collier Citrus Harvesting, one of seven commercial contractors that are shaking trunks and brushing canopies around the state.
Mr. Brown, the retired Department of Citrus official, estimates that in five years, machines will harvest 100,000 acres of oranges here. But there are obstacles. Machines work best on the big, regularly spaced, groomed young groves in the southwest, and some do not work at all on the smaller, older, more irregular acreage in central Florida. Machines are hard to use on Valencia orange trees, because shaking them risks prematurely dislodging much of the following year's harvest.
Still, the economics are in mechanization's favor. A tariff of 29 cents per pound on imports of frozen concentrated orange juice lets Florida growers resist the Brazilian onslaught--but not by much. According to Ronald Muraro and Thomas Spreen, researchers at the University of Florida, Brazil could deliver a pound of frozen concentrate in the United States for under 75 cents, versus 99 cents for a Florida grower.
Mechanical harvesting can help cut the gap. Mr. Loukonen of Barron Collier estimates that machine harvesting shaves costs by 8 to 10 cents a pound of frozen concentrate.
The spread of mechanization could redraw the profile of Immokalee, which today is a rather typical American farming town. Seventy-one percent of the population of 20,000 is Latino--with much of the balance coming from Haiti--and 46 percent of the residents are foreign born, according to the 2000 census. About 40 percent of the residents live under the poverty line, and the median family income is below $23,000--less than half that of the United States as a whole.
Philip Martin, an economist at U.C. Davis, points to the poverty as an argument in favor of labor-saving technology. He estimates that about 10 percent of immigrant farm workers leave the fields every year to seek better jobs. Rather than push more farmhands out of work, he contends, introducing machines will simply reduce the demand for new workers to replenish the labor pool.
And there are some beneficiaries among workers: those lucky enough to operate the new gear. Perched in the air-conditioned booth of Mr. Meador's canopy shaker, a jumpy ranchera tune crackling from the radio, Felix Real, a former picker, said he can make up to $120 a day driving the contraption down the rows, about twice as much as he used to make.
Yet many Immokalee workers are nervous. ``They are using the machines on the good groves and leaving us with the scraggly ones,'' said Venancio Torres, an immigrant from Mexico's coastal state of Veracruz who has been picking oranges in Florida for three years.
Mr. Loukonen, the Barron Collier manager, said the farm workers were right to be anxious. ``If there's no demand for labor, supply will end,'' he said. ``They will have to find another place to work, or stay in their country.''
|
