COUNTRY CORNER

Agriculture gets tossed by the sociopolitical perfect storm.
By Steve Fairchild

Today, agriculture faces a perfect storm of globally driven issues—energy prices, immigration and world trade.

In this storm, raging energy prices have a countervailing calm wind from biofuels. An industry is thriving, indeed, when the attention from an image of a dead sheik on a billboard actually bolsters its case. The damage being done to farm account ledgers by high energy prices is counterbalanced by the promise of a robust biofuels market. And the speed at which ethanol plants are going online has quietly brought to us the question, “Is there enough corn?”

Juxtapose the invigorating thought of commodity prices finally being driven by scarcity with the image of another billboard. Maybe the Immigration and Naturalization Service pays for this one. And maybe it says, “Invest in legal labor, or we will shut you down.”

For all the screening that forthright agricultural firms do to ensure legal labor, illegal labor slips through. And in any industry there are those who are less than forthright, hiring workers of questionable status on the cheap and quiet. Yet it is costly to society for a firm to deal in illegal labor, whether it does so willingly or not. Social services and benefits are affected. Local schools are affected. An already stressed medical system is put under more weight. All this is to say nothing of the needs and dignity of the laborers themselves. Agriculture has an illegal labor problem. As immigration comes to the forefront of political debate, it is time to deal with it.

Get one thing out of the way. This isn’t a question about ethnicity or even nation of origin. Rather, the magnitude of illegal immigration across our southern border has come down to a question of sovereignty. In crossing by night, by tunnel or over a fence, aliens are clearly lawless and clearly expecting to get away with it. The only assimilation for a criminal is to live in an alternate world—on the low down and in the soul-evaporating confines of a shadow existence. Hiring them is to join the lawlessness, and a nation or company is not long for the world when it invites lawlessness.

The first course of action should be to stem the flow—be it by 6,000 National Guards or other means. The 6,000 might better be 60,000, so I prefer a wall. Make that a wall with a welcome sign. We’re a nation of immigrants and need to remain so for philosophical and economical reasons. Our base instinct tells us to hate walls—especially those of us who came of age with the specter of the Berlin Wall and all of its anti-freedom gloom. But that one was to keep people in, wasn’t it? A wall with INS service centers that allow for legal immigration is more welcoming than a guest worker program that says, “Yes, we’re still the land of promise and hope, but you can only stop by long enough to trim the grass. You can’t own a part of this dream.”

Moreover, immigration plays large even in world trade. Developing countries (the ones whose citizens have the most incentive to leave for places like the United States) are acting in bloc fashion to demand more from the WTO. It is conceivable that the developing nations’ demands could boost local economies and help stem the flow of nationals seeking greener financial pastures, jumping fences, living and working illegally. To that end, our immigration policy should encourage market-based reform in developing countries. Our trade policy should demand it.

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Such is the nature of a whirling storm: Energy policy, immigration and international commerce may seem a good ways from the back 40, but they’ll drench it all the same.