Vitamin H-2 Can Go A Long Ways To Solving Our Ilegal Alien Problem

I'll bet you think we haven't made any extra generous or reasonable effort to deal with the problem of people from other countries wanting to enter the United States for work. To hear the open borders crowd, you'd think it is impossible for people who want to come to this country to come here any other way short of applying for citizenship, except to sneak across the border illegally.

Well, you'd be wrong, there, bunky. Check out this article in Portland's El Hispanic News, which talks about the H-2 program for legally bringing agricultural workers into our country. Government approved, safer, with better monitoring and working conditions, the H-2 program brings in more and more people who want to work here legally every year. Farmers, etc. simply have to prove that the demand for that particular kind of labor in America is greater than the supply and that they need to bring people in from outside (which is definitely true about agriculture). And shazam! Problem solved. People happy.

So why do we still go round about this? Well, my thinking is this: Big Agriculture wishes H-2 wasn't here or they could limit it, because without H-2, they have lots of cowed, frightened slave labor they can mistreat any way they please with no one the wiser because their workers are afraid of being deported and won't talk to the authorities about abuses. H-2 means they are getting workers at a considerably lower wage, but still much higher than they would have otherwise paid, AND the workers have some kind of monitoring and protection.

So what are fighting about? Bring on H-2! Let's get this whole problem resolved. We've got the solution and we've got the people, we've just got to get Big Agriculture to stop whining about this and embrace the compromise.