SACRAMENTO BEE

June 19, 2007

Farmworker visas touted

UFW, immigrant activists say foreigners can help safeguard food, provide other important services.

By Susan Ferriss - Bee Staff Writer

The United Farm Workers union and immigrant activists are reaching out to U.S. Senate conservatives, trying to convince them that more foreign worker visas will help safeguard U.S. food production and provide other vital services for Americans.

"There is nobody born in America standing in line to work in agriculture today," UFW President Arturo Rodriguez said Monday in a teleconference with reporters.

The Rev. Luis Cortez Jr., president of Esperanza USA, a network of Latino churches, called on Americans to establish a system to allow workers from poor countries to legally perform entry-level work many Americans don't want their children doing.

"Do you ever look into ... (your children's) beautiful eyes and say, 'I want you to be the best cotton picker there is, or the best dish washer or the best bed maker?" Cortez said, explaining what he has asked some non-Latino worshippers he meets.

As UFW leader, Rodriguez took the unusual step of joining with agribusinesses seven years ago to lobby for legal residency for farmworkers and a system of future guest worker visas.

A plan called AgJobs supported by agribusiness and the UFW was included in a Senate bill that fizzled early this month. Debate is expected to resume in the Senate this week.

Rodriguez praised Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for their support for earned legal status and future visas as necessary to help curb illegal immigration.

UFW representatives will visit other senators Thursday to underscore that without foreign workers, many U.S. farms would go under or move in greater numbers to Mexico or elsewhere.

Right now, the U.S. visa system fails to offer farmworkers and other laborers an avenue to immigrate to the country legally and work in a job that's lower-skilled but in high demand, Rodriguez and others said.

Most immigrants gain U.S. legal status only because a family member, usually a spouse, sponsors them. Employers complain that only a few thousand visas for lower-skilled workers without those family ties are available each year.

Frank Sharry, director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C., said a visa reform "would give people a line to get into."

Right now, he said, "There's a 'Keep Out' sign on the border, and a 'Help Wanted' sign 10 miles in.' "

Sharry said immigration reform is always a compromise, a "big trade-off" for pro-immigrant groups, and that the Senate bill didn't just call for legal status for immigrants. It also would have cut family immigration, imposed a points system shutting out many future low-skilled workers from ever settling here and created the toughest workplace and border enforcement in history.

Rocio Saenz, president of a Boston local of the Service Employees International Union, said as Americans age, they're going to need immigrants to help fill a growing demand for caregivers and other services.

Legal status for these immigrant workers now would help her cause to improve wages and benefits for all workers, she said.

Arturo Carmona, California leader of a national network of 300 Mexican immigrant hometown associations, said: "Immigrants realize they are living in one of the most hateful periods in history, in terms of immigration."

Carmona's Confederation of Mexicans in North America, or COFEM, its Spanish acronym, is urging Congress to also debate how the United States and Mexico could together spur job growth and better wages in immigrants' hometowns in Mexico and Central America.

"Unless we integrate that into the debate," Carmona said, "we're going to continue to see this phenomenon."