However, the system is shaky, and growers know it. They're pushing a plan in Congress that they say would create a stable workforce by permitting more than half a million undocumented immigrants to become legal residents if they work five years in agriculture. Farm-worker advocates are opposed, and the debate is reviving the bitterly divisive concept of amnesty for people who immigrated illegally. It is exposing the federal government's lax enforcement of immigration laws in agriculture. And it is dramatizing the need for changes in a system that serves neither farmer nor worker well.
Organized labor says over our dead bodies.
No more Mexico' Andrade, pruning peach trees in a 50-acre orchard south of here, says he might not risk another border crossing. It's real hard to come back. Opponents ridicule the plan, spelled out in a Senate bill introduced late last month, as merely the growers' latest ploy to exploit foreign farm workers, hold down wages and ensure a lasting supply of cheap labor. U.S. citizens generally shun farm work because it is low paying, seasonal and physically demanding. It's a raw deal that ignores the humanity of these people.