http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_3284913

Conor Friedersdorf, Columnist

The lettuce farmers are upset because they think California has too few immigrants.

Special Report: Beyond Borders
Get Blogging Now: Beyond Borders Blog

About 50,000 workers are needed to harvest the season's crop, according to an industry trade group, but only half those positions will be filled. Even illegal immigrants are reluctant to work harvesting lettuce, given the high sweat and low pay involved.

"Come January, we could see lettuce rotting in the fields because there will be no one to pick it," farmer Jon Vessey told the L.A. Times, conjuring Steinbeckian horrors.

I've done a bit of economic research that may aid Vessey. According to several sources I've consulted, raising the wage paid for picking lettuce will increase the number of workers willing to do the work.

Of course, higher wages will cut into the profits of lettuce farmers. Eventually American lettuce farms may even shut down as production shifts to cheaper locales.

The agricultural industry has a point when they note that farm closures hurt not only farmers who must adjust to economic changes, but packers, farm equipment providers and industry suppliers, too.

Hence the best economic argument for a large-scale guest worker program: It will allow the United States to retain industries that would move abroad otherwise. Either companies will be able to find competitively priced labor here or they will outsource anything that can be done elsewhere. Higher paying jobs will be lost and associated industries will suffer in the process.

Here's the counter-argument: Immigration policy affects homeland security, national identity, domestic crime and our social welfare system. It affects our demography, our infrastructure and our schools.

It affects our economic system too, of course.

But given the stakes in short, the future prosperity of our nation and everyone in it, immigrants included America cannot afford to ground its immigration policy on what's best for lettuce farmers, meat packing companies or poultry farms.

As Max Frisch, a Swiss author, once wrote of Europe's guest worker experiments, "Workers were called and human beings came."

Future low-skill immigrants to the United States won't just be lettuce pickers or maids or janitors they'll be our neighbors. If our policies don't recognize that reality if we craft policies designed to use these people as cheap labor they will understandably react treating our country as a source of work rather than a nation worth preserving. That's why a guest worker program, not to mention continued toleration of large-scale illegal immigration, is a bad idea no matter what happens to lettuce farmers without it.

* * *

Jack Kendrick, a Beyond Borders Blog reader and rancher, has his own thoughts about agriculture and immigration: "From 1965 (when the Bracero program ended) to present, the tomato harvest increased 12-fold and the work is being done with about 1/10th as much labor. Necessity is the mother of invention and higher productivity is very closely linked in our economy with a higher standard of living. A tight labor market could very conceivably precipitate a dramatic drop in the cost of producing lettuce.

"In any case, of the $1 head of lettuce in a Wal-Mart Superstore, only about 16 cents went to the farmer and of that only 6 cents can be attributed to the cost of labor. Labor costs could go up 100 percent and even if the cost of labor was passed on, the 6 cents would be barely noticeable. The $1 head varies in price more than 6 cents from week to week."