Speech #990183191

But it is quite another thing to divorce the debate over sanctions from the public policy debate by excluding a major industry from their scope for parochial considerations. Ironically. the transparency of such an idea is evident even to Its supposedly intended beneficiaries. As a letter from the H2 coalition. a coalition of agricultural interests who have been working to try to make some changes in the law. stated: Agricultural employers hire undocumented aliens. and thus contribute to the undocumented alien population the bill seeks to address. INS has indicated less than 20 percent of undocumented aliens work in agriculture. We are willing to accept our role in reducing that population. Historically. agriculture has totally opposed any immigration reform legislation. but now we are willing to work for a bill. But to support immigration reform legislation. as the H2 coalition did in the Senate. we need to have a streamlined Temporary Worker Program to use when domestic workers are not willing and available to take agricultural jobs. Thus. at the very time that attitudes in the agricultural community have begun to accept the inevitability of immigration legislation and have sought to work in the process. there are those who would like to carve out a totally new Draconian exemption for the entire industry. In addition. I suspect that many in the industry are smart enough to realize that although they might be exempt from the sanctions provision of the bill. you can bet where the Immigration and Naturalization Service would concentrate its resources to round up illegal aliens if an agricultural employer exemption were to become part of the law. It makes no sense whatsoever for us to accept the proposition that to get some control in a real sense over illegal immigration. we have to cut through the nonsense of saying it is illegal to come here seeking a job. but it is perfectly legal to hire someone who is here illegally and yet carve out such an exception. The Border Patrol folks have told us that they absolutely need an Employer Sanctions Program. To say that we would set up employer sanctions but would allow a total exemption of employers in one industry it seems to me would be fraught with peril. Yet even though the exemption would be for those employers. we would not exempt the employees. So. if the INS wanted to go and round up people who are here illegally. the easiest place they could go would be in the agricultural fields where they know the employers have an exception. but they could still find the illegal aliens as employees. So what would happen? Havoc would rule as far as agriculture is concerned.