With all the talk about illegal immigration these days, here’s a perspective you don’t hear a lot:

In total, California farmers worked the harvest season with 100,000 fewer workers than they needed, according to the ag trade group Western Growers.

Tom Nassif, president of that trade group, is spearheading a public lobbying campaign that proclaims what for years was too taboo to say out loud: the agriculture industry relies on undocumented laborers. And Nassif—whose organization represents the growers who supply half of the nation’s fresh produce—says the problem his members face isn’t too many illegal immigrant workers, but too few.

And the fact is, it’s not just California. What would agriculture do without the constant flow of immigrants from Mexico and Central America? It would disappear.

“I’ve lost a lot of people ever since about three years ago, when they started requiring us to prove that the people we hire are legal.”

Despite more stringent hiring rules, Urquidez says, many growers continue to skirt the laws and knowingly hire illegal workers. If they don’t, he says, “then who’s going to do the work?”

Bush’s answer to this: AgJobs. But some conservatives aren’t having it.

Led by US congressmembers Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado, and Duncan Hunter, R-San Diego, this bloc of hard-liners argue that illegal aliens steal jobs from able-bodied Americans, dilute American culture, and are an affront to the nation’s legal norms.

“Able-bodied Americans” haven’t been farm workers for a generation. Why would that change now?

Via / Monterey County Weekly