Despite Years of Their Failed Leadership, California Loves Incumbents

by Joe Guzzardi
May 31, 2011

For nearly 25 years, I lived in California’s San Joaquin Valley also known as the world’s breadbasket. Come spring time, I could always count on one thing. Immigration advocates from the farming industry, the Hispanic lobby and Capitol Hill would begin their annual plea for more foreign-born labor under the threat that without them “crops would rot in the field.”

I marveled at this nonsense since, within a three mile radius of my home, I saw workers tending to cherry orchards, strawberry fields and vineyards. Nothing ever rotted. In fact, some years growers harvested record yields.

Among others in Congress, California Senator Dianne Feinstein is a leading proponent of importing more workers. Despite her dubious public record of being 100 percent wrong about a farm labor shortage, few in Congress have worked harder than Feinstein toward the goal of increasing agricultural workers’ numbers.

In 2008, Feinstein told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It’s an emergency. If you can’t get people to prune, to plant, to pick, to pack, you can’t run a farm.” In her 21-word statement, Feinstein misled the public five times. As I personally witnessed, there are plenty of workers pruning, planting, picking, packing and running farms. Whatever else may be going on in California agriculture, no “emergency” exists.

In her four Senate terms, Feinstein has continuously re-introduced an AgJobs bill that would serve as an illegal alien magnet and opposed E-Verify, the federal program that confirms that new employees are legally authorized to work in the United States. Feinstein, along with her Democratic colleague Barbara Boxer, has also voted for every proposed increase in non-immigrant worker visas and each Senate amnesty bill put before her. At the same time, neither Feinstein nor Boxer has initiated any action to reduce rewards to illegal immigrants or to end chain migration, a policy that has directly contributed to California’s overpopulation.

Most frustrating is that viable solutions to Feinstein’s pet cause—more ag workers—are readily available. First, for example, Japan when faced with a choice of bringing in seasonal crop workers or opting for mechanization, chose the latter with excellent results. Second, the federal government has a successful existing program that allows for unlimited agricultural workers, when necessary, the H-2A visa. Third, in 2007 responding to a possible summer worker shortage, California passed S.B. 319 that increased the possible numbers of hours out of school teenagers could work during the peak harvest. Now that’s the way to solve a problem: look for local answers before urging Congress to issue more visas.

Despite the years of remarkably poor leadership that Californians have suffered through, the electorate refuses to vote out the legislators who put them deeply into debt and subject them to underwriting the costs of a broken welfare system. Witness as an example Boxer’s comfortable win last November over her well financed Republican challenger Carly Fiorina.

In California’s 2010 House of Representatives’ election, the results were staggering. No seats changed hands; voters did not fire a single incumbent. California’s delegation remained 33-20 in favor of the Democrats.

With California in such tough shape, who else is to blame but the elected officials? And while it would seem to follow that those in office should be held accountable and shown the door, that’s not been the trend in California.

Joe Guzzardi has written editorial columns—mostly about immigration and related social issues since 1986. He is a senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and his columns are frequently syndicated in various U.S. newspapers and websites. Contact him at [email protected].