Monday, June 27, 2011

Georgia Farmers Rewarded For Using Illegal Immigrants Receiving Probation Pickers In Exchange Of Latino Loss

Ray Henry and Kate Brumback wrote the following for Tampa Bay Online:
It's 3:25 p.m. in a dusty cucumber field in south Georgia. A knot of criminal offenders who spent seven hours in the sun harvesting buckets of vegetables by hand have decided they're calling it quits - exactly as crew leader Benito Mendez predicted in the morning.

Unless the cucumbers come off the vine soon, they will become engorged with seeds, making them unsellable. Mendez's crew of Mexican and Guatemalan workers will keep harvesting until 6 p.m., maybe longer. Not so for the men participating in a new state-run program aimed at replacing the Latino migrants Georgia farmers say they've lost to a new immigration crackdown with unemployed probationers.

"Tired. The heat," said 33-year-old Tavares Jones, who left early and was walking down a dirt road toward a ride home. He promised Mendez he'd return the next morning. "It's hard work out here."

Mendez urged another man to stay. "I need you today," he said. "These cucumbers not going to wait until tomorrow."

Republican Gov. Nathan Deal started the experiment after farmers publicly complained they couldn't find enough workers to harvest labor-intensive crops such as cucumbers and berries because Latino workers - including many illegal immigrants - refused to show up, even when offered one-time or weekly bonuses. One crew who previously worked for Mendez told him they wouldn't come to Georgia for fear of risking deportation.

Farmers told state authorities in an unscientific survey that they had more than 11,000 unfilled agriculture jobs, although it's not clear how that compares to prior years or whether the shortage can be blamed on the new law.
So let me get this straight - farmers are experiencing a labor shortage, most likely due to a recent law cracking down on immigration, and instead of those hiring the illegal immigrants being punished, they get cheap labor.

I thought one of the probationers summed it up pretty well. Robert Dawson, who was on probation for commercial burglary and on his fourth day of fieldwork, said farmers were partially to blame for the labor shortage because they hired illegal immigrants.

"I feel like they should have gone and hired us first before they even hired them," he said. "You pay us right and we'll get out here and work. If you don't want to pay us nothing and we're out here in this hot heat, 100-and-some degree weather, it ain't gonna last."

I say let these farmers lose their crops.

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