The administration is actually opposing another amnesty — this time the one for illegal-alien farmworkers (S. 340), due to be offered as an amendment to the farm bill next week. OK, the White House hasn’t actually changed its thinking on immigration but see this from Wednesday’s CongressDaily:
Acting Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner said Tuesday the Bush administration would oppose adding AgJobs. “The farm bill should be more limited in scope,” avoiding jurisdictional issues that would arise from putting immigration policy into farm law, Conner said, Bloomberg News reported.
This despite the tendentious baloney emanating from the ag lobbyists; I especially liked this example:
“We are either going to have our food produced by foreign workers here in the United States, or the farming process will move to foreign countries.”
Tell that to farmers who raise grain or cotton or tree nuts or all the other crops whose harvest is heavily mechanized. What these tax-eaters are saying is that the American people have to bear the social and other costs of importing a third-world workforce in order to avoid importing a larger share of winter tomatoes from abroad. What rot.