It goes without saying that anti-immigration shrillmonger Mark Krikorian would dislike today’s Wall Street Journal article [link for on-line subscribers only] on the dependence of Arizona lettuce growers on Mexican labor. In the Journal’s words,
The fieldworkers – virtually all of them Mexican – are the backbone of the region’s largest industry. It pumps $1.5 billion annually into the Yuma County economy and accounts for a third of Arizona’s agricultural revenue, according to state agriculture department statistics. Between November and March, 90% of the leafy vegetables produced in the U.S., including broccoli and cauliflower, originate here, giving Yuma the nickname of the nation’s “winter salad bowl.”
Most of the production is packed at local salad-processing plants and shipped to major supermarket and fast-food chains, like Safeway and McDonald’s Corp. Each year, Yuma throws a weekend celebration called “Lettuce Days” to mark its agricultural prowess and showcase its products.
This year, Antonio Oseguera isn’t celebrating. He needs about 350 workers, 40 tractors and a fleet of trucks to harvest lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower from 3,000 acres of land he controls around the area. He says he’s had to scrounge for workers like never before in his two decades in the business. “The lettuce has to be picked; that’s the cry of the land,” he says. “But there aren’t enough workers.” He has lost $1 million in potential sales this season alone, he says. His business is operating $250,000 in the red.
Mr. Oseguera used to be able to find plenty of green-card holders to do the work. But these legal immigrants are aging – their bodies injured or too worn out by the backbreaking work to keep it up. The old timers’ offspring, born and raised in America, are educated enough to seek better opportunities. Those willing to do physical labor prefer construction or factory work, which offer higher pay and year-round income.
“So, who’s going to do the work?” asks Mr. Oseguera, though he knows the answer all too well. Ahead of the harvest, he took out ads in the local papers for fieldworkers. The grower got one reply, he says – from a mechanic. He didn’t get the job.
Arizona officials also concede that growers have trouble filling field jobs with legal employees. Janine Duron, a senior official at the employment agency meant to match workers with jobs, says she gets requests all the time for fieldworkers, but she rarely fills them. She estimates seven out of 10 farm workers in Yuma are illegal.
The moral of the story is not that illegal immigration is a good thing but that a system for employing Mexicans legally, such as President Bush’s proposed guest worker program, is needed to provide a reliable supply of lechugeros. Mr. Krikorian, however, is a bitter opponent of the Bush proposal, which he has frequently equated with allowing unlimited illegal immigration. Today he adds a revealing twist: “Illegal immigration is simply another form of corporate welfare for agribusiness.”
This formulation more than hints at Mr. Krikorian’s fundamental economic beliefs. Restrictions on cross-border movement, whatever their noneconomic merits or faults, overtly interfere with the free play of market forces. To call it “corporate welfare” when a willing employer hires a willing worker at a mutually agreeable wage is to turn the concept of “welfare” on its head. By that light, lowering tariffs, abolishing wage-price controls, cutting taxes and deregulating industries are all “corporate welfare” measures. Why do they deserve that name? Presumably because they can lead to more profitable businesses (along with the weeding out of the inefficient resource wasters). Those who regard that prospect as undesirable and prefer that the government regulate markets are not usually thought of as conservatives.
Having read many, many Krikorian posts in the NRO Corner, I doubt that he is in fact a conservative in any meaningful sense. He seems, rather, to be a single-issue zealot with a basically left-wing economic outlook who tries to “pass” as a rightist for tactical reasons. I don’t, mind you, think that there is anything dishonest or dishonorable about that tactic. It displays a certain cleverness on the anti-immigrationists’ part. Some of them write for labor union and old-line liberal publications, others for National Review. Advocates of other causes tend to cluster on one side of the political spectrum, making the opposite half leery of listening to them. It’s far more adroit to infiltrate both.
It would be more adroit yet for the infiltrators to adopt the principles of the camp that have nominally joined. That is, however, a challenge when, like Mark Krikorian, one is trying to sell a Big Government cause to the party of Liberty. Now and then one’s bedrock opinions peek out from beneath the ideological astroturf.
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