ITEM: "Harvest havoc is predicted for this fall," warned the headline of a California Central Valley Business Times story for August 24, 2007. The CVBT story reported that the agriculture business lobby was pushing for revival of the Ag JOBS proposal included in the immigration bill that stalled

in the U.S. Senate this summer: "Farmers say the AgJOBS bill would assure that enough people could enter the country legally to harvest crops. 'There's no question that at some point Congress has to come up with a system for bringing legal workers into the United States,' says Jack King, manager of policy development for the California Farm Bureau Federation."

ITEM: "American agriculture will go down the tubes if there is not an adequate workforce to pick and plant and prune," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), according to an August 31 online story in the Capital Press of Salem, Oregon. "Our nation's $260 billion agriculture industry is facing a major crisis unlike any I have seen in my lifetime," warned Feinstein, sponsor of the Senate's AgJOBS amnesty bill. "Today, it is estimated that 70 percent of the workers who plant, prune and harvest American's fruits and vegetables are undocumented, which means they are here in an illegal capacity," said Feinstein.

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ITEM: "The legislation intends to provide for a more stable, secure, safe, and legal American agricultural workforce and food supply.... The AgJOBS bill would provide a two-step solution: For the short term, on a one-time-only basis, experienced, trusted workers with a significant work history in American agriculture would be allowed to stay here legally and earn adjustment to legal status. For the long term, the currently broken and cumbersome H-2A legal guest worker program would be overhauled and made more streamlined, practical, and secure." So declares the website of the main Senate Republican sponsor of the legislation, Idaho Senator Larry Craig.

CORRECTION: Will American agriculture "go down the tubes" without the AgJOBS infusion of foreign labor? Not likely; agribusiness advocates for increased foreign migrant labor have been making the same dire predictions for decades. The AgJOBS Act (S. 237), officially titled the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits, and Security Act of 2007, proposes amnesty for 1.5 million alien farm workers currently residing in the United States illegally. It will also make it easier to bring in new foreign agricultural workers. This AgJOBS amnesty was one component of the larger "comprehensive immigration reform" package--pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), and President Bush--that was defeated in June.

Opponents of the AgJOBS bill offer many solid arguments against this new Feinstein-Bush-Kennedy-McCain-Clinton (et al.) amnesty effort. In short, they point out:

* There is no solid evidence supporting claims of widespread dire "crisis" in U.S. agriculture due to lack of foreign workers.

* Previous clampdowns on foreign farm labor have resulted in advances in farm innovation and mechanization that have increased U.S. farm productivity and profitability.

* The current H-2A visa program already allows for use of temporary foreign farm workers; if reform of the H-2A process is needed, it should be pursued, instead of pushing an entirely new amnesty.

* The AgJOBS amnesty will simply lead to additional amnesties and calls for more amnesties, as the general amnesty and agricultural worker amnesty of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (not to mention the six subsequent amnesties passed by Congress) attest.

* The AgJOBS amnesty will encourage more fraud and add a huge administrative burden for the already-swamped Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

* Aliens legalized under the AgJOBS blue-card program will come with enormous direct and indirect economic costs to U.S. taxpayers.

* The sheer numbers involved and the impossible screening and administrative procedures necessary for the AgJOBS program will make a total mockery of all efforts to implement genuine border security.

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Senators John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and Larry Craig have retailed frightful tales from the agribusiness lobby about produce rotting in the fields because farmers supposedly can't find Americans who will work or can't get enough seasonal Mexican laborers due to the "too cumbersome" regulations of the current H-2A visa program. The reality is that except for a few exaggerated anecdotes, there has been no widespread loss of crops due to a seasonal labor shortage. Under the current H-2A program, farmers can bring in foreign workers, provided that American workers are unavailable and they provide housing to the foreign workers.

The agribusiness lobby complains that the H-2A program is "too cumbersome." Translation: The industry and its lobbyists don't want any restrictions on the importation of labor. This means a continuation of the failed immigration policies that not only pose huge economic, social, political, and security problems for American society at large, but have long-term negative consequences for American agriculture as well. The H-2A visa program, like the Bracero program before it, has encouraged farmers to continue unsustainable farm-labor practices and even to expand their reliance on cheap alien labor rather than modernizing and mechanizing farm practices.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the majority of farm workers (about 55 percent) are native-born Americans. It is true that in the fresh fruit and vegetable industry, a much higher percentage of the labor is performed by (legal and illegal) foreign workers. That was also the case with regard to many other crops, which growers claimed could not be mechanized. However, when faced with labor shortages, growers have switched from backbreaking, labor-intensive methods to mechanized or machine-assisted planting, cultivating, and harvesting. Machines now harvest virtually all of our grains, which for thousands of years were harvested by hand. The same can be said for cotton, potatoes, sugar cane, nuts, and most below-ground vegetable crops. Tomatoes are another example. The Center for Immigration Studies report Alternatives to Immigrant Labor? notes:

   The harvester eliminated entirely the need for hand-carrying 40 to
   50 pound field boxes and made 24 hour/day harvesting possible. Hand
   harvest required five Lh/ac [Labor hours per acre], while machine
   harvest today uses only 0.4 Lh/ac. California processing tomato
   production increased from 2.3 million tons in the early 1960s to
   more than 10 million tons today, making California the world's
   leading producer of processing tomatoes. Total labor use dropped
   from 13.5 million hours in the hand-harvest years to about 3.8
   million today. Mechanization has allowed growers to become more
   competitive by reducing harvest cost. Hand harvest was quite
   costly, accounting for almost 50 percent of total production costs
   to the grower (as is the case with many other crops). With
   mechanized harvesting, the harvest costs are only about 16 percent
   of the total costs incurred by an average farmer.

Sponsors of the AgJOBS legislation offer estimates suggesting that 860,000 alien farm workers can be expected to take advantage of the blue card offer in the first year, with a total cap of 1.5 million. That "cap," however, even if strictly enforced (a vain hope, based on past and current enforcement failures), would result in an additional several million spouses and children of blue-card holders also receiving permanent resident status and, subsequently, full citizenship.

Instead of providing a permanent fix to the farm labor shortage, AgJOBS will accelerate the continuous "chain migration" that has plagued the United States over the last several decades. The experience has been that many of the "temporary" farm workers stay permanently and move on from the arduous and low-paying seasonal work of picking produce to work in food processing, construction, manufacturing, landscaping, and the hotel and restaurant industries. The growers then must import new laborers. That is precisely what happened under the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) amnesty of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).

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There is a hidden cost to those cheap table fruits and vegetables hand-picked by legal and illegal aliens. A 1997 study by the Center for Immigration Studies found that the 10-year direct and indirect cost to the taxpayers for aliens legalized under IRCA general and agricultural amnesties was $79 billion, for federal, state, and local assistance programs and services. This was the net cost to U.S. taxpayers, after accounting for whatever taxes the aliens had paid.

The 1986 SAW amnesty also demonstrated the levels of fraud that we can expect to see repeated with the AgJOBS amnesty. According to a study of the SAW program by Dr. Philip Martin, Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of California at Davis, there were fewer than 137,000 immigrant farm workers in California who did enough farm work to quality for SAW status. However, nearly 600,000 illegals applied for the amnesty in California. The INS did not have sufficient manpower to sort out all of the false applicants, and, as a consequence, many were given amnesty who shouldn't have qualified.

The U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services is already overwhelmed with a backlog of more than six million immigration applications and has been wracked with serious corruption scandals involving the sale of visas by employees. It is ludicrous to expect that this agency, which already is inadequate to its current duties, will be able to adequately and efficiently take on these new responsibilities.

From a national security stand point, the consequences can be severe. Critics point out that one of the terrorist conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Mahmud Abouhalima, a New York City cab driver, had been legalized under the SAW amnesty, even though he never worked in agriculture. With the current terrorist threat far greater than it was 20 years ago, our immigration system in greater disarray, and our borders even more porous, it is the height of irresponsibility to provide more opportunities for terrorists to penetrate our defenses, as the AgJOBS amnesty does.