Based on his own candid assessment of his work force, 80 percent of his more than 200 seasonal laborers are illegal immigrants.
Sure, they show him paperwork that says they are here legally, but Sakuma and thousands of other farmers who rely on migrant labor to harvest their fruits and vegetables know better.
Send those migrant laborers back to where they came from and those crops would rot in the fields and in the orchards.
“They are here doing what other people won’t do,” Sakuma said in a recent interview about the E-Verify legislation. “If you think that white America is going to come out here and pick these strawberries, you have been living in the dark for a long time.”
Therein lies one of the big unanswered questions in the complex, controversial morass known as immigration reform: If all the illegal labor is sent packing, who’s going to harvest the crops that allow large scale farm operations to survive?
Agribusiness can make a convincing case that the farm industry as we know it wouldn’t survive a stand-alone E-Verify bill affecting some 6 million businesses.
Supporters of the bill said it is one of the measures necessary to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the country. There are some 7 million illegal immigrants working in the country and roughly 24 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, according to Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. He argues that the labor market could be filled with legal workers in these troubled economic times.
Sponsors of the E-Verify legislation want a vote on the bill on its own merits, not as a package of measures tied to immigration reform.
One reasons is obvious: Comprehensive immigration reform has turned into the messiest of political issues with no obvious solution generating a political consensus.
President Barack Obama is on the right track when he says the E-Verify bill needs to be part of a complete overhaul of immigration laws.
And any complete overhaul has to include some sort of amnesty provision so businesses that depend on illegal migrant labor out of necessity – not desire – aren’t left high and dry.
