CORVALLIS (Oregon) GAZETTE-TIMES

April 5, 2006

Farmers: Hispanic labor needed

By Ian Rollins
For the Gazette-Times

As a farmer, Gary Cook finds himself in the middle of the immigration controversy embroiling the entire country.

He and some other farmers agree the current immigration system, which has allowed 11 million people to be here illegally, needs fixing. But they say Hispanic farm labor is vital to keeping their costs down.

Cook, president of Cook Family Farms in the Dever-Conner area north of Albany, employs a handful of Hispanic workers at $9 an hour or more. He said he tries to hire non-Hispanic people to work on the farm, “but what I hear from them is, ‘I don’t need the money bad enough to work this hard.’”

Peter Kenagy, a North Albany farmer, echoed that.

“You keep hearing about ‘family-wage jobs,’” he said. “It denigrates this type of work, but somebody’s got to do it.”

“I’d love to pay that kind of wage, but I can’t do it because nobody would be willing to pay that much for their food,” Cook said.

Instead, Cook noted, produce from overseas would take over the markets. It already has a large share of the market now.

Cook and Kenagy were among a group of four farmers who spoke to the Albany Democrat-Herald last week about immigration, the subject of congressional debates and protests nationwide.

All four have Hispanic employees who are legal as far as they know, but three of them said they hire seasonal labor through contractors. All four say they want a legal workforce, but they think it’s unreasonable to simply kick 11 million illegal immigrants out of the country.

“Agribusiness depends on Hispanic labor,” said Skip Gray, owner of Gray Farms Inc. west of Millersburg. “The government needs the money and we need the workforce.”

“I do understand the issue of crossing illegally,” agreed Brian Graffenberger, owner of Rivers Nursery in Dever-Conner. “But we’re benefiting from it, probably more than they are.”

Illegal immigrants pay taxes and Social Security, he pointed out, but they don’t file for tax returns or collect Social Security.

Keeping costs down is important to these farmers. They say costs are constantly going up, but they can’t sell their crops for any more money than they could 25 years ago. Broccoli still sells for $400 per ton, the same as it did in 1981, Cook said.

Cauliflower sells for $300 per ton, which is down from $420 in 1981, Gray said.

“We had kids picking broccoli for minimum wage,” Cook recalled. “They’d throw the heads, and if they went where they were supposed to, great. If they didn’t, oh well. So we had to get guys who cared.”

Because the pay isn’t a family wage, the farmers said they can only get teenagers or Hispanic workers to do the work.

“The difference between a high-school kid and an adult man is, the man is feeding his family,” Cook said. “The kid is buying an iPod. There’s a level of ‘I need this job’ among the men.”

Kenagy doesn’t think there are any easy answers, but he likes the idea of a guest worker program.

“I don’t think it should lead to citizenship,” he said. “It ought to be set up for a certain number of years, fewer years if you’re here year-round, more years if you’re seasonal. There should be a registration card so you can get your driver’s license and insurance, and a minimum amount of cultural education.”

A guest worker program, where an immigrant can be in the United States for six years before having to go home, is what President Bush has proposed. But a bill passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week would allow everyone here illegally to become citizens over time, and a House bill passed earlier would make being here illegally a felony.

The Senate is debating the issue, and the debate likely will continue this week.