05/22/06 What if the Immigration Issue fails?

What happens if the immigration issue fails? I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. The U.S. Senate is currently debating immigration reform. The House has already passed legislation that Craig Regelbrugge - Senior Director of Government Relations for the American Nursery and Landscape Association - calls a punitive, anti-employer enforcement type of bill. Regelbrugge - who also serves as co-chair of the Agricultural Coalition for Immigration Reform - says Senate passage of immigration reform legislation is just the next step. That step - he says - leads to a contentious House-Senate Conference Committee - where agriculture could come out a big loser. REGELBRUGGE: The last government statistics that we have describing the agricultural workforce, these are Department of Labor statistics, indicated that 52% of the labor force in agriculture admitted that it lacked proper legal status so we've known since the late 90's that more than half the workforce that is sustaining American agriculture is quote "illegal." And so we are deeply concerned that if we don't solve this problem we are going to see, frankly, pretty close to blood in the fields. We're going to see farmers lose a key element of their workforce with no realistic way to replace it. Regelbrugge says many Americans - especially those living in rural areas with labor intensive agriculture - understand the role of the immigrant workforce and how the process works. But according to Regelbrugge - folks in other parts of the country have the wrong idea... REGELBRUGGE: There' this perception in suburbia that this is all about 40 or 50 guys hanging around outside a 7-11 waiting to be picked up and put to work and paid cash under the table. That's not the real story. I mean it exists but the real story is employers who are interviewing and hiring everybody who crosses the transom. They're looking at documents that appear genuine on their face, they're meeting their requirements under the law, they're withholding taxes, they're withholding social security and they are living in profound fear that the documents might not be real and that one day the music might stop and these workers may be lost. And misconceptions - Regelbrugge says - are the reasons why the majority of Americans have the wrong idea about how to resolve the immigration issue...tape REGELBRUGGE: There is this perception among a lot of Americans that if we just increased wages a dollar or two; Americans would go flooding out into these jobs. The reason we have this shortage in agriculture is because Americans have moved into other jobs in the economy and the Ag jobs have been the first ones to be left unfilled, if they weren't filled by immigrants. Immigration debate continued in the Senate Wednesday. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.