A worker passes his gloves off to the next shift at a lettuce farm in Salinas, CA. (REUTERS/Robert Galbraith)
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In a recent op-ed, Eliseo Medina of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) falsely labels the Legal Workforce Act – a bill to implement the E-Verify program nationally – as a jobs killer. Although the bill is a jobs killer for illegal immigrants, the Legal Workforce Act opens up millions of jobs for unemployed Americans and legal workers.
It's true, e-verify does scare away undocumented workers. It's happened in Georgia which has its own state version. Problem is, it's only half-working. It may be scaring away undocumented immigrants, but no one is rushing in to fill those jobs.
Nearly half of the 132 Georgia businesses polled in a private survey this month say they are experiencing agricultural labor shortages.
The council started doing the survey after farmers complained the new law is scaring migrant farmworkers away from Georgia and putting hundreds of millions of dollars in crops at risk.
Who could have predicted that Americans wouldn't want to work these shitty jobs in brutally hot fields for crappy pay, no benefits, and seasonal. Instead, crops are laying in the fields, rotting away. Brilliant work, Lamar!
In Georgia, the need for field workers has gotten so desperate, that the governor has urged convicts to work the fields.
It’s 3:25 p.m. in a dusty cucumber field in south Georgia. A knot of criminal offenders who spent seven hours in the sun harvesting buckets of vegetables by hand have decided they’re calling it quits — exactly as crew leader Benito Mendez predicted in the morning.
Unless the cucumbers come off the vine soon, they will become engorged with seeds, making them unsellable. Mendez’s crew of Mexican and Guatemalan workers will keep harvesting until 6 p.m., maybe longer. Not so for the men participating in a new state-run program aimed at replacing the Latino migrants Georgia farmers say they’ve lost to a new immigration crackdown with unemployed probationers.
“Tired. The heat,” said 33-year-old Tavares Jones, who left early and was walking down a dirt road toward a ride home. He promised Mendez he’d return the next morning. “It’s hard work out here.”
The experiment is certainly not working.
So far, the experiment at Minor’s farm is yielding mixed results. On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon, said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor’s farm.
“Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, ‘Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,’” said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. “They just left, took off across the field walking.”
Mendez put the probationers to the test last Wednesday, assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers.
Of course, much of ag America voted for Republicans in 2010, so they're getting what they asked for. Just drive the 5 between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles and you'll see anti-Democratic signs lined up along hundreds of miles of highway.
Or maybe this ridiculous move is all part of the GOP's plan to destroy America in order to improve their presidential chances in 2012. This is certainly a two-fer -- they get to placate their anti-immigrant base, while also destroying the economic lives of thousands more Americans, from farmers, to immigrants with cash to spend, to those businesses who catered to those immigrants.
Remember, e-verify has put hundreds of millions of dollars of crops at risk in Georgia alone. Just imagine the economic decimation this will cost if taken national.
