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Comparing apples, oranges and pears
By Dan Moffett

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Sunday, October 01, 2006

Congress has not passed an immigration bill this year and probably won't. But the mere talk of closing the Southwest border and cracking down on illegal workers has been enough to have a dramatic impact on businesses across the country.

The New York Apple Association reports a "crisis situation" because of a 30 percent decline in the migrant labor force that threatens to leave fruit rotting on the trees, despite growers' willingness to pay pickers up to $13 an hour.

The California Farm Bureau Federation reports as much as a 20 percent reduction in employment of farmworkers - a shortage of about 70,000 - during the peak of the harvest season. Pear growers near San Francisco might have had a record year but could not find enough workers to pick the fruit before it was too late. Strawberry farmers have plowed under crops, and vineyards have grapes dying on the vine.

In South Texas, there aren't enough workers to get the onion harvest out of the ground. "We're seeing the wolf at the door," Texas Produce Association president John McClung told The Associated Press. The Potato Growers of Idaho say their workforce is down 18 percent. In Kentucky, the tobacco crop is burning up in the fields. The Wind River Mushroom Farm in Wyoming is closing because it can't find workers.

In Florida, Miami-Dade farmers are signing empty grocery bags and sending them to Congress with messages of support for a federal guest-worker program. Citrus growers face millions in losses if they can't overcome labor shortages soon. Belle Glade farmers lost hundreds of acres of corn this year because no one came to pick them.

Precise numbers don't exist, but the estimate is about 75 percent of the nation's 2.5 million farmworkers are here illegally. So far, only a small percentage - certainly less than 10 percent - of the illegal workers have left farming for other jobs, returned home or gone underground. Yet, they leave a powerful warning.

As much as the wolf at the door, this is the canary in the mine shaft. Again, Congress hasn't done anything yet. Most of the reaction so far is over what might happen. Federal immigration officials made a series of highly publicized sweeps of job sites this year, deporting illegal workers and arresting employers. The intimidating effect of the sweeps is apparent now in Florida's orange groves, California's pear orchards and what's in between.

The American Farm Bureau says if the government doesn't go beyond border enforcement and find a way for immigrants to work here legally, "the impact on fruit and vegetable farmers nationwide would be between $5 billion and $9 billion annually."

Beyond agriculture, business leaders along the Gulf Coast are committing millions to recruit and train up to 20,000 new construction workers by 2009 to help the rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina. The Louisiana Legislature will spend $15 million on training. The immigrants who were supposed to anchor rebuilding have migrated elsewhere to lower-profile jobs.

The National Restaurant Association is urging lawmakers to create a program that would allow undocumented workers to earn green cards. The government issues only 10,000 cards for service-industry workers each year. "Over the next decade," the NRA says, "the number of jobs in the food service business will grow one-and-a-half times as fast as the U.S. labor force."

Nick Vojnovic, chairman of the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association, says his members have to have foreign workers. "Immigrants are the lifeblood of our industry," he told Nation's Restaurant News. "Florida's unemployment rate is 2.8 percent. We've had stores unable to open because there aren't any workers."

There is an inescapable reality Americans will learn as the contentious debate in Washington sets off angry brush fires in communities across the country: The U.S. economy cannot sustain itself without immigrant labor. Congress can't build a wall high enough or long enough to change that.