The Good, Bad & Ugly of Obama's Immigration Deal

The Good, Bad & Ugly of Obama's Immigration Deal. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.

One of the hot topics at this year's annual hort convention is immigration and President Obama's recent immigration announcement has both sides of the fence shouting. What ag producers really want to know is what this deal will mean for them and that's where Washington Farm Labor's Dan Fazio comes in.

FAZIO: The question that we are asked is how will this affect agriculture? Some people are saying it will have a negative impact because people with their new found work authorization will leave agriculture. I really don't think that's going to be the case. I think it's going to have very little impact on agriculture and if any impact, a small negative impact.

He says there is one really important issue that people are not discussing.

FAZIO: What people are not talking about is the fact that once a person has a social security number they're eligible for unemployment insurance benefits. So in that case you might say that well a person might be more apt to take a seasonal job knowing that they're going to get unemployment insurance at the end of the seasonal job whereas right now we know that undocumented people are not eligible for unemployment insurance.

And Fazio says there is another problem.

FAZIO: The government and the Obama administration bears the brunt of the burden on this has made it harder to use the legal worker program than the illegal program and whenever it's harder to do something legally than illegally you get people coming here illegally.

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