Bait and switch on immigration policy.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, there are now 11 million illegal immigrants in our country, an estimate many consider to be extremely low. That being the case, it is somewhat ironic (though not funny) that corporate farmers in Southern California and Arizona are feeling the squeeze of a labor shortage in picking such crops as lettuce, strawberries, chiles, and apples.

The huge numbers of illegal immigrants residing in those two states--estimated at two and a half million in California and a half million in Arizona I brings light to the falsehood that America needs more Hispanic immigrants to help pick the crops. After all, according to government estimates, the total U.S. agricultural workforce is only 1.6 million.

Larry Nelson, the mayor of Yuma, Arizona, an area especially hard hit by the shortage of field hands, says that field work is hard and doesn't pay well, and so illegal aliens are inclined to work in industry and construction I where they displace American workers and cause wage stagnation or wage reduction. Because corporate farmers and businessmen want labor that is inexpensive for them (expensive for taxpayers), they put on a sustained push to pass the AgJOBS Act of 2005, which would have, in short, given temporary citizenship to illegal immigrants who agree to work at least 360 days in agriculture over a span of six years. When they are not in the fields, they can take any job that they can get. At the end of that time, they would obtain full U.S. citizenship. Their spouses and children ride on the workers' coattails.

The primary sponsor of the act, Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), stated about the act's effect: "The only experience our country has had with a broadly-used farm guest worker program (used widely in the 1950s but repealed in the 1960s) demonstrated conclusive, and instructive, results. While it was criticized on other grounds, it dramatically reduced illegal immigration while meeting labor market needs."

The successful "guest worker program" Senator Craig is referring to was called the Bracero Program, and that program was not similar in makeup to the AgJOBS Act. The Bracero program did not offer citizenship; it required the guest workers to work only in agriculture; and it stipulated that U.S. workers could not be displaced or their pay reduced by Mexican workers. Senator Craig is also being disingenuous when he implies that the AgJOBS Act would likely reduce illegal immigration: any type of amnesty begets increased illegal immigration.