Labor divided over immigration plan

Copyright © 2007
Associated Press


Last updated Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

By GARANCE BURKE -- Associated Press Writer

SANGER, Calif. (AP) In the 1960s, farm labor leader Cesar Chavez rallied fieldhands to speak out against a guest worker program that recruited millions of Mexicans to pick crops at low wages.

Today, farmworker advocates are throwing their weight behind a proposal in the current Senate immigration bill that would bring thousands of laborers to the country's most productive fields but offer them virtually no chance of putting down roots in the U.S.

The United Farm Workers say it is their best shot at improving working conditions in fields nationwide, and especially in California, where 92 percent of workers are foreign-born.

Activists complain that immigrant farmworkers are sometimes underpaid, not paid at all, overworked, exposed to pesticides, given poor housing or subject to other abuses.

Some aging members of the last temporary-worker push - the Bracero Program, which operated from 1942 to 1964 - worry the plan could repeat past indignities.

"If they're going to have braceros again, well, they need protection," said Agustin Oropeza, an 82-year-old from Zamora, Mexico, who picked oranges, lemons, lettuce and tomatoes in California in the 1940s and '50s. "They can't just leave them to sleep in the middle of the fields and drink from puddles, like they did with us."

The proposed AgJobs program brokered between growers and the UFW over the past decade would open the way to legal status for those who worked in U.S. agriculture for at least 150 days over a two-year period ending Dec. 31, 2006. The program would be capped at 1.5 million.

After that, new farm laborers would be recruited in their home countries and brought to the U.S. under an existing guest worker program, but would be able to stay for only 10 months at a time. They would not automatically qualify for citizenship and would have to wait an estimated eight years just to get on line.

Even then, they would have little chance of winning permanent residency, because a new point system would give higher priority to people with education and skills.

Farmers who claim labor shortages left fruit rotting on the ground last summer say it is a fair agreement.

Union leaders are dismayed that newer recruits will not get a pathway to citizenship. Farmworker advocates previously had sought to insert that provision but said they had to sacrifice several key points to keep the compromise alive in this year's version of the bill.

"We're willing to work through the process so we're at the table," said Diana Tellefson, executive director of the UFW Foundation, a nonprofit organization linked to the union. "We're going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that workers have the protections they need."

The AFL-CIO and the Laborers' union oppose the broader immigration bill, arguing that workers here on a temporary basis are more vulnerable to labor violations. The AFL-CIO contends some pickers will stay in this country illegally rather than go home when their time is up - something that happened under the Bracero Program, too.

Lulu Valdez, a young mother in Porterville, said her relatives in Mexico who work in the sugarcane harvest would willingly come to the U.S. for just a few months each year. But she added: "I just think a broader amnesty would be a lot better."