Say Anything Blog

Anyone else wishing Craig had left the senate after he got caught looking for love in all the wrong places?

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday added to an Iraq spending bill a controversial provision to help pave the way for undocumented agriculture workers to win legal status, a move that may reopen the divisive immigration debate on the Senate floor.

The so-called Ag-Jobs amendment, sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho), would create a process that allows undocumented workers to continue to work on farms. Without the amendment, Feinstein warned that the U.S. would lose $5-9 billion to foreign competition, tens of thousands of farms would shut down and 80,000 workers would be transferred to Mexico. The bill would sunset in five years.

“Agriculture needs a consistent workforce,” Feinstein said. “Without it, they can’t plant, they can’t prune, they can’t pick and they can’t pack.

The justification here, that American farmers would lose billions to foreign nations if they aren’t allowed to employ illegal immigrants, doesn’t seem like a very good justification to me.  Why is letting farmers exploit employees that exist outside the protections of our labor laws a good thing?  And why is giving them this edge over foreign farmers - many of whom are currently trying to scratch a living out of the ground with grandpa’s femur in third-world backwaters around the world - a good thing?

Sounds like a lose-lose situation in those terms, not to mention the blow to American sovereignty and rule-of-law it would deal.