Early last Sunday morning in December 2003 factory worker Mrs. Smith was walking home in New York after shopping a gallon of orange juice, some grape fruits and milk in a neighborhood market for breakfast. Mrs. Smith, age 56 household’s head makes $15.50 per hour. As proposals are made for strict national immigration control laws, even stricter on illegal immigrant farms and labor workers, most attention is due to many millions of Americans who, like Mrs. Smith take for granted the cheap orange juice, grape fruits, tomatoes, lettuces, milk, cheese, etc, etc. This nation has achieved these cheap produces, products of first necessity at popular prices all in compliance with strict Agriculture control laws, thanks always to one common precedent: illegal immigrant farm’s workers and labor = cheap labor.

That is, before the new immigration laws are enacted, the American public already felt the consequences. Millions of acres with orange farms, grape fruits, produces, cattle, etc., are abandoned suffering the lack of these immigrant farms’ workers who are afraid of a government’s persecution wade against them which has unjustly put many of them in jail. As the enclosed photographs taken this month of January shows, there is a crisis already in many of these farms around the United States; because there are NO AMERICANS who are willing to take these farm’s jobs for the same salary paid up to now. Unless these farm’s jobs salaries are raised from $5.75 up to $18.00 to $20.00 per hour we’ll need these immigrant workers, and then, otherwise, millions of Americans like Mrs. Smith would not be able to afford a glass of orange juice in the morning, nor the lettuce and tomato in their children’s hamburger with cheese and a glass of milk.

Yes new immigration laws are necessary, but most households are not against immigrant workers; rather, most Americans’ concern is about terrorism and violence directed against them from the outside. They know, intuitively, that the government does not has to protect them from these immigrant workers, rather from criminal and terrorist attacks.

This is why America needs these good people hard working immigrants, every year!.

Sincerely,

 

Teresita DJ Barrera
CEO of NAFA & its
Center of Study for the
Peoples’ University of the Americas (UNPAM)

HHP/tbm

 

enclosure: photographs