"It's such a common refrain in the illegal immigration debate that it's become a punch line in jokes: Illegal immigrants do the work most Americans won't do.
"Many of you don't buy it. In fact, you wonder aloud how in the world can we legalize illegal immigrants when so many American citizens are out of work?
* * *
"It's just not something that most Americans are going to pack up their bags and move here to do," said farmer Steve Fortin, who pays $10.25 an hour to foreign workers to trim strawberry plants for six weeks each summer at his nursery near the [California-]Nevada border. He has spent $3,000 this year ensuring domestic workers have first dibs on his jobs in the sparsely populated stretch of the state, advertising in newspapers and on an electronic job registry."
Photo: Benjamin Reynosa, 49, of Orange Cove, picks table grapes near Fowler, Calif. As the economy tanked over the past two years, the immigration debate has focused on whether immigrants are taking jobs Americans want. Here, amid the sweltering melon fields and vineyards of the nation's top farm state, where one of every eight people is still out of a job, the answer is no.
Comments