Immigration

Immigration. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

President Obama addressed the nation on Tuesday to talk about immigration and according to Dan Fazio with the Washington Farm Labor Association, he didn’t really say a lot.

FAZIO: Monday was a great day and Tuesday we came back to earth. President Obama’s speech was a good speech if you are not involved in the details of immigration reform but for people that are studying the issue it was severely lacking. Especially troubling was there was no mention of a future flow program, a guest worker program for farm workers.

Fazio says that jobs are the magnet that brings these immigrants to America.

FAZIO: To solve that we need a three part program. We need to do something about making it harder to hire undocumented workers and that’s the e-verify program and then we need to have a future flow program and then of course we need to do something about the 10 or 11 million people that are here undocumented.

He says the President is on board with two out of the three.

FAZIO: But he’s not apparently going to give us a future flow program if we take his proposal. So the good news is that I think that we’ve got the votes to kill any proposal that dies not allow labor intensive agriculture to move forward. And the Senate proposal has a very excellent agriculture guest worker program in it.

More tomorrow on this important issue.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.