SAN ANTONIO NEWS-EXPRESS

December 12, 2005

IMMIGRATION
Labor real issue, not guarding borders

by VICTOR LANDA

Churn, or something like a churn, could be the unexpected effect of extreme immigration policies.

We're already seeing a small version of it in the labor upheaval that was left after the waters receded in New Orleans. After the storm and after the flood, mostly immigrant workers, lured from the farms in California, filled the reconstruction labor vacuum.

Forget that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin complained about jobs going to Mexicans; forget that the sounds of New Orleans jazz have been replaced at work sites by cumbias and nortenas blaring from work-crew boom boxes. The lasting effect of Katrina has been the labor churn.

In the weeks after Katrina, the fields in California's famed vineyards were left with few, if any, workers to harvest the grapes. Farmworkers left en masse toward the promise of better wages in Louisiana. A recent report in the Christian Science Monitor calls the farm labor shift a "turning point in the nation's ability to produce its own food."

And it's not just the grapes that are being lost on the vines. Farmers across the nation are feeling the effects as well. There are anecdotal situations where lettuce farmers, short 200 workers to bring in a crop, fear going under, losing the farm to less expensive imported produce from China, Canada and Mexico.

Raisin growers in the Central California Valley, according to the same Monitor report, need 50,000 pickers for the harvest and have only 15,000 to do the job. They fear a repeat of the last harvest when $150 million to $300 million worth of grapes were lost, left on the vines for lack of labor.

The effect has been steadily increasing since before Sept. 11, 2001. But since that date, border enforcement has been tightened, the number of agents has tripled and immigration has become a matter of national security. Instead of going back to Mexico and risking a more dangerous return trip, the undocumented workers have ventured across the country in search of more lucrative work. And as they move, no one is left in their place to labor in the fields. If you stop the flow, you produce a churn.

The immigration problem will not be solved at the border. The dynamic between the U.S. and Mexico is a reciprocal flow. Workers are moving across both ways.

The labor pool is constantly in flux, replenishing itself as some workers return home and others arrive. There is, of course, an aggregate increase in the total number of immigrant workers in this country, and that increase is what riles the anti-immigrant crowd. But shutting the border will only cause the problem to reappear somewhere else, because the issue is not the border. It's labor.

And as the border becomes less porous, the work force shifts and churns.

There is more. According to economic analysis, for every agriculture job lost, 3.5 jobs are lost in related areas, such as packing and transportation.

Regardless of how you approach this problem, immigration reform will certainly and eventually affect our pocketbooks. Is America willing to compromise its standard of living? Immigration policy has little to do with the border and has more to do with labor policy and the economy than many are willing to admit.