WASHINGTON POST

November 22, 2005

By Sonya Geis
Washington Post Staff Writer
 
CALEXICO, Calif. -- Hours before dawn, Chuck Clunn stood on a street corner
in this dusty border town and shook his head, dismayed at the small number
of men milling in the dark. Workers usually swarm streets near the border
crossing in the early morning hours, but today Clunn and other labor
contractors looking for farmworkers found a crowd half the size they had
been hoping for.

"This is usually just people everywhere. Last year the whole town was
moving," Clunn said. Now, he said, the foremen say, "Hey, man, we have
plenty of generals, but there's no Indians."

For the past year, the fertile valleys here that provide 90 percent of the
nation's winter lettuce have faced a labor shortage. The construction
industry is booming, luring workers with year-round jobs offering better
pay. U.S. Border Patrol agents have been cracking down in nearby Arizona,
leading many of those who pick the crops -- almost all of them Mexican and
many, by all accounts, illegal aliens -- to avoid the lettuce-growing border
counties.

With the lettuce harvest beginning, farmers in the $1 billion winter
vegetable industry are panicking about getting their crops out of the
ground. Vegetable growers estimate they could be 32,000 workers short of the
54,000 they need for the winter harvest, which runs until March. Last year,
local farmers left hundreds of acres of lettuce in the fields because they
lacked the manpower to harvest it.

Worker shortages have swept the Western agriculture industry, bringing $300
million in losses to raisin growers in California's San Joaquin Valley in
September and causing consternation about this winter's harvest from the
Christmas tree farms of Oregon to the melon fields of Arizona.

"Today I have approximately 290 people working in the field," Jon Vessey
said recently. Vessey runs an 8,000-acre winter vegetable farm with his son,
Jack, near El Centro, Calif. "I should have 400, and for the harvest I need
1,100. . . . There's a disaster coming."

The Western Growers Association, which represents 3,000 farmers, is lobbying
the Bush administration to make it easier for farmers to tap the labor pool
just below the border.

Labor Department statistics show that about half of the nation's 1.8 million
farmworkers are in the country illegally. Tom Nassif, the association's
president, said growers try to check workers' documentation but many have
falsified papers.

Nassif said a better approach would be for the U.S. government to allow
Mexican citizens to live here while working in the fields and return to
Mexico when the work is done. His long-term goal is to see passage of the
Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act, or AgJobs. The
bill, proposed by Sens. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and Edward M. Kennedy
(D-Mass.), would allow undocumented farmworkers already in the United States
to become legal permanent residents and would streamline the current
guest-worker program.

"There are just some jobs people don't want to do," Nassif said. "It's the
most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people
need to recognize that. We need to make them legal."

Jack Vessey said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of
employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. "We got one
person," he said. "He showed up and said, 'I'm not going to do that.' "

Marc Grossman of the United Farm Workers acknowledged that the growers face
a labor shortage, and he said his organization is cooperating with Western
Growers to back the AgJobs bill. But Grossman said the labor shortage "is
largely of their own making."

In the fields, he said, "the pay is so low, the benefits nonexistent, the
conditions so harsh, if you can, you do something else," Grossman said. "You
save money and buy a tool belt and go into construction. Or you work at a
hotel. Anything to escape the fields."

Growers and workers also said illegal workers have moved north because of
increased enforcement of immigration laws along the Arizona and eastern
California border with Mexico. Border Patrol arrests were up 41 percent
between fiscal 2005 and 2004 near Yuma, Ariz., where lettuce is grown.

Workers and labor contractors have numerous stories about the Border Patrol
targeting farmworkers.

"Over in Brawley I lost three crews to the Border Patrol," said Gilberto
Lopez, a labor contractor who competes with Clunn to provide workers to
local farms. "People hear about that and leave. They don't want to be
harassed."

Border Patrol officials denied focusing on farmworkers.

"Our position is not to target agricultural workers specifically," said
Michael Gramley, spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol's Yuma sector. "Our
target is any illegal aliens."

Yuma Mayor Larry Nelson, a Republican, said he once believed the border
should be closed entirely. Responsibility for his community's economic
health has changed his mind, he said.

"We have more jobs in America than we have workers," he said. "If you took
every illegal out of the United States right now, you would shut down the
food industry, the vast majority of the hotels and all the service
industries. If you stop [immigration], this nation will come to a screeching
halt."

Jon Vessey agreed. "Most people out there say, 'Let's close the borders. And
then we'll just go down to Von's and get our vegetables,' " he said,
referring to a supermarket chain. "Well, it doesn't work that way."