An Urban's Rural View

The New York Times thinks Congressmen representing farm districts will decide the fate of the proposed immigration legislation (http://tiny.cc/…). When it goes to the Republican-controlled House, the bill will have to contend with conservatives' unhappiness with the path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented workers. But it will have the support of farm groups, because it will facilitate farmers' hiring temporary immigrant labor.

Republicans, the Times reports, represent 17 of the 20 House districts where agriculture is a major industry.

Enter Ramesh Ponnuru. He's a senior editor of the National Review, a conservative magazine, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He argues that the temporary-worker program, not the path to citizenship, is the "terrible flaw" in the immigration legislation.

As Ponnuru put it in a column on Bloomberg (http://tiny.cc/…), "one of the worst things about illegal immigration is that it creates a class of people who contribute their labor to this country but aren't full participants in it and lack the rights and responsibilities of everyone else." The proposed temporary worker program "doesn't solve this problem. It formalizes it."

The result, he says, would be "a two-tier labor market." Citizens could quit their jobs or move from industry-to-industry. The temporary workers couldn't, at least not without worrying about being deported.

"Some foreigners may choose this fate as better than their alternatives," Ponnuru says. "It seems unfair, though, to ask Americans to compete with workers who will be more willing to put up with bad working conditions because of this artificially precarious situation."

Why then, you may wonder, is labor onboard with this temporary-worker program when it has opposed earlier proposals? Ponnuru offers two reasons: The labor leaders see it as the price of legalizing the illegal immigrants and they figure they can push to liberalize the program later and make the temporary workers legal, forcing Republicans to be the bad guys again by voting against it.

But would the unions really benefit from legalizing the illegals? And would any push they made for further liberalization go anywhere in today's legislative climate?

What's most speculative, though, are Ponnuru's unstated assumptions: first, that eliminating the temporary-work program would make farmers boost wages and improve working conditions so much that an army of Americans would come off furlough to pick the strawberries and tomatoes; second, that the farmers could survive these higher costs without a big increase in the prices of their produce.

Both assumptions are questionable. The American farm-worker army has been AWOL for a long time now. And if farmers succeed in raising prices very much, they risk being wiped out by less-expensive imports.

Somehow, even for some conservatives apparently, it's easier to assume that American farmers are greedy guys making fat profit margins than to understand that they compete in an international marketplace.

Just because it's a cliché doesn't mean it isn't true: We can import labor or we can import food.

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