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Immigration and the Colbert Factor

Comedian Stephen Colbert's cocksure, faux-conservative persona failed him just once during his testimony before members of Congress on September 24. When asked…

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Comedian Stephen Colbert's cocksure, faux-conservative persona failed him just once during his testimony before members of Congress on September 24. When asked by Representative Judy Chu why he would choose to work on the migrant worker issue, Colbert lifted his right hand to touch his unnaturally smooth coiffure and said, "I like talking about people who don't have any power. And it just seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come and do our work but don't have any rights as a result." 

Even so, Colbert's presentation has been criticized as inappropriate, a circus, even offensive. But, honestly, it was nothing short of brilliant, a show-stopping satire delivered by a man who has no equal in ability to shine light on the absurdity of U.S. policy.

Few issues offer such a wealth of nonsense and contradiction as immigration. Take the often-cited argument that immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans -- which would be true if Americans were in fact interested in those jobs. By and large they are not, especially in U.S. agriculture. 

In California, where one out of eight adults is currently out of work, farmers have posted ads for 1,160 farmworker positions since January. According to an Associated Press analysis, only 233 U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents have applied for those positions and only one grower hired any applicants – 36 in all. 

The fact is that today more than a million people work as seasonal agricultural workers in this country and between half and two thirds of them do the work illegally. Most of the rest are legal residents or legal guest workers. 

Earlier this year, the United Farm Workers (UFW) launched the nationwide "Take Our Jobs" campaign to encourage U.S. citizens to do farm work, a challenge that Colbert took up and which led to his testimony in Congress. Since June 24, 8,600 people have inquired about the jobs but only seven now are working full-time on the fields. 

Colbert worked one day and turned that experience into self-mockery -- the expert born in a day -- and ridicule for the members of Congress who hide behind the convenient guise of free marketeer. 

"This brief experience," he said in the hearing, "gave me some small understanding of why so few Americans are clamoring to begin an exciting career as seasonal, migrant field worker." 

"So what's the answer?" Colbert queried. "I'm a free-market guy. Normally, I would leave this to the invisible hand of the market, but … even the invisible hand doesn't want to pick beans."

Farm work simply doesn't pay enough for most Americans. More would be interested, according to agricultural economist Philip Martin from the University of California Davis, if salaries grew by half to a minimum of $15 dollars an hour. But before that would happen, Martin added, farmers would mechanize the work to minimize hand labor. 

In other words, Americans will never be offered enough to do the job. And since there will never be "vegetables that pick themselves," as Colbert suggested as an alternative, farmers will continue to use immigrants as the best and least costly alternative.

Federal law acknowledges this to a degree with the H-2A Guest Worker Program, but it is rarely used due to cumbersome and costly bureaucratic hurdles. Growers and migrant workers instead favor legislation that would give illegal farmhands the opportunity to legalize their situation after working on a farm for several years. The so-called AgJOBs bill has language to this effect, hence the current discussion in Congress. 

Sadly, similar legislation has been introduced and reintroduced in Congress for more than a decade without any progress and this year won't be any different. It's hard to get reasonable bills past members like Republican Steve King of Iowa who blame illegal workers for poor wages and labor conditions at farms, suggesting that if they only went away the issue would be solved.

Meanwhile, farm workers continue to pick our fruits and vegetables without a right to unionize anywhere in the country and without even basic protections when injured on a worksite in 15 states, as UFW's President Arturo Rodriguez said in his testimony as he sat beside Colbert. 

Rodriguez said in an interview afterward that, like most farm workers, he initially didn't know who Colbert was. But now that he knows, he is only grateful because "he brings a whole different audience to this issue." Six days after the hearing, over 800,000 people had watched at least part of Colbert's testimony on CSPAN's YouTube channel alone.

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