Immigration Reforms Have Made It Harder For Migrants To Steal Jobs From Tomato-Pickers In Pennsylvania

Stricter enforcing of immigration laws concerning migrant workers have left some farm owners in Pennsylvania going out of their tomato-picking minds:

State, local and federal crackdowns on illegal immigration have broken his supply chain of laborers. Most of those were Hispanic men who had come every year for decades, and whose immigration status Mr. Eckel recorded with the documents they provided to him. He kept them all in the file cabinets at his neat farm office — the Migrant Seasonal Farm Worker Protection Act forms, the Labor Department’s I-9 forms, the H-2A agricultural visa privilege forms — though he knew that, for the most part, it was a charade.

“It’s a ludicrous system,” he said the other day, sitting behind his desk in a light brown windbreaker that matched the fallow hillside beyond his office window here, 10 miles north of Scranton. “If the national statistics are correct, 70 percent of the documents in those cabinets are fraudulent.”

For years Mr. Eckel went along. “But in the current political climate,” he said, “I just can’t take the risk of planting two million tomato plants and watching them rot in the field.”

This more rigid enforcement comes as part of incumbent Democratic Representative Christopher Carney’s designs on being re-elected. Since there is nothing people hate more than Hispanics stealing away the jobs U.S. Americans so desperately want:

“Over the last couple of growing seasons, farmers have been feeling a tremendous amount of stress over the way this issue has been playing out,” said Gary Swann, governmental relations director for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. “And if people think all we have to do is raise wages and hire local workers, they are simply mistaken.”

Local workers will not do the job, Mr. Swann said.

Oh.

Immigration Issues End a Pennsylvania Grower’s Season [NY Times]