http://www.lompocrecord.com/articles/20 ... 31706c.txt

Where have all the workers gone?
By E.J. O'Brien/Special To The Record
The Lompoc Record article on Wednesday headlined “Nation's farmers fear tighter supply of immigrant laborers this year” highlighted the desire of farmers to continue the influx of cheap and available foreign workers. What the article did not discuss was the costs that the rest of us bear in order to facilitate this flow of illegal labor.

A couple of years ago, a Mixtec strawberry worker had to be incarcerated to force-medicate him after he had infected 50 others with a difficult-to-treat form of tuberculosis. The cost to the county exceeded $1 million.

Local hospitals treat illegals for free, at a cost of millions. Supervisor Joe Centeno wants to create a housing coalition for the Santa Maria Valley. The object - affordable housing - is another word for cheap immigrant housing subsidized by the rest of us.

Our schools are overrun with non-English speakers to the detriment of our indigenous student population. The dropout rate is tremendous, in spite of bend-over-backwards efforts by the educational establishment. Of course, those dropouts don't work in the fields, and are more likely to be gang-bangers.

Our county, state and federal prisons are filled with Hispanic druggies. What does it cost the Lompoc Police Department to keep the local Mexican gangs apart? Nationwide, hundreds of Hispanic gang members from 248 different gangs were arrested recently.

I asked a local farm bureau official about his workforce. “They all have documentation,” he said. When queried about the percentage of those illegally here, he opined “about 90 percent.” I went on to ask how many of the second generation would do the same work. “Less than 10 percent,” was his educated guess.

The Record article estimated that one million migrant workers were needed annually. Most experts agree that there are at least 11 million illegal aliens in the United States now, not to mention another 14 million legal immigrants. Why is it that from a pool of 25 million immigrants we can't get 5 percent of them to work the farms? The truth is that the next generation of farmworkers is now growing up not here, but south of the border.

Obviously, the proposed guest worker programs are a smoke screen, because most of the “workers” will be siphoned off into other enterprises eager for cheap labor. If there were better enforcement of our laws in industries where American workers would do the work, more farmworkers would be available.

Any temporary guest worker program should be aimed at migrant farmworkers only, making all other work illegal - as it is supposed to be today. I believe most Senate proposals are thinly disguised amnesty programs. Sen. Arlen Specter even wants to give illegals a gold card!

American workers are being poorly served: their taxes are used to subsidize their competition. There are now a myriad of immigration programs aimed directly at the middle class worker (Lottery, HlB, H2A, etc.). The vested interests who want cheap labor or new union members or new parishioners, or just the fulfillment of a one-world mentality (“We are a nation of immigrants”, etc.) care little about saving our national patrimony.

There are even those in this country who see America as not worth saving. If left unchecked, immigration will become one more eroding force detrimental to our children's and grandchildren's future.

E. J. O'Brien lives in Vandenberg Village.