My roommate in college was from the central part of the state. They grow a lot of citrus and peaches and watermelon in his part of the world. He came from a prominent farming family in a rural-agricultural area. He told stories about how he’d go help in the fields at harvest time. He recalled a day when INS showed up to pick up all the migrant workers and take them away for deportation.
He said the workers would be back in the fields, hauling watermelons, before the INS agents got back to town.
I thought of that story, people eager to work hard, long, thankless jobs for low pay, while reading about what’s happening in Georgia:
After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.
The entire AJC story is a good read. Closer to home, we’ll soon see something similar.
The law requires proof of legal residence on the job, at school and when obtaining state benefits.
It also allows police to arrest anyone on reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally, requires courts to void contracts involving undocumented immigrants and requires employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check applicants’ legal status.
[…]
Alabama’s new law could have unintended consequences and be costly to enforce, said Gary Palmer, president of the Alabama Policy Institute, a conservative group that generally favors illegal immigration reform.
Some aspects such as the E-Verify requirement, are good, he said. But “it will be interesting to see” if native Alabamians will flock to lower-wage jobs now filled by immigrants, he said.
There are no easy answers.
I’ve read three stories on this today, though, and found 450+ comments between them. Some of them, surprisingly, have been worth reading.
So we’re making dinner tonight, where it has become my permanent job to remove the silk from fresh corn. We’d picked up a few ears from the farmers’ market last week and there was a corn earworm larvae in one of them. That didn’t go over well.
So we threw some of the corn out, as it had been damaged. Presumably the farmers we bought from had a bad streak of luck with moths or pesticides. Maybe they should do a lot of trap cropping.
Doesn’t really matter, The Yankee said, she wouldn’t buy corn from them anymore. Two ears did make it on the grill, and when we ate it with dinner she pronounced it the best corn she’d ever had. It was good stuff. Went well with the burgers, too.
But, still, I think she’ll buy from someone else at the farmers’ market tomorrow.
