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Listen, this didn't happen overnight.

There was a time when I was young, that much of this work was done by ex-cons, disabled folk, etc. In fact, I remember a schizophrenic guy and his wife who came through our town every year. They lived in migrant housing and slept on bare mattresses. They were most certainly were not illegal to this country.

My mother and I, through the outreach program at our church, would bake bread and other staples for the migrant community. We would invite the little kids to Vacation Bible School so they would have supervision. We would bring them blankets and used clothes. It was essentially a community support system. IIRC, my father would even help repair things on occasion...cars, buildings, that sort of thing. I was pretty young, so its a bit murky. I still remember the smells though.

In addition to these types of workers, children as young as 12 would work as well, some local and some who were children of the migrants. Entire families sometimes worked, including my grandmothers family.

Somewhere in the late sixties, early seventies (think The Great Society) these kind of people started disappearing. Many of them went on disability or welfare, or where moved into other government caretaker projects. It was perceived as cruel that we were allowing these poor disadvantaged people to work and we needed to take care of them.

About the same time, more and more Mexican migrants began to fill the void. Many of these folks are legal, but first generation immigrants (which Pat Buchanan and a lot of folks around here also oppose) who would travel from place to place until they gained the English skills to settle in and move up the economic ladder.

As I have stated previously, I know one family with six children who lived in a two room shack near the highway on the bus route. A blanket covered the doorway the entire year, and they had no electricity. Today, that family has six college educated children and grandchildren that don't speak Spanish at all. In addition, they own several large houses and live a professional, middle class life. There are many, many stories just like this one in our town. They have completely assimilated within a couple of generations.

As the original migrant types filtered into social programs, and as more and more restrictive laws where passed regarding child labor (You must be 16 or older with restricted hours) more and more work began to open up for anyone who wanted it. Mostly, there are published routes of farming communities (that hasn't changed and it's always been that way) and approximate dates when harvest due. Some families, groups of men and others travel together from place to place. Often, these days, families are settled in one location while the men and over-16 boys follow the harvest.

Now, in my town most white families, and, increasingly, second and third generation Hispanic families have moved into service-based and professional jobs—teachers, health care professionals, bankers, small business owners, etc.

There has definitely been upward mobility. What this has taught me is twofold, one is that supply tends to meet demand no matter what, and that liberal hearts may be in a good place, but they have a tendency to really muck up the works and never change things for the better. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions. This is not the workers fault, it's the do-gooders fault.

Finally, as far as documentation goes, most of those in agriculture that I know do NOT hire illegals knowingly. In fact, several growers here have started entire communities which include schools and churches in an effort to keep good workers invested and coming back year after year. They check documentation and run some background checks. BUT if documentation seems fishy, most of the time people are scared to death to question it because the government does a pretty skunky job of backing them up and instead they get opened up for discrimination lawsuits by hotshot lawyers.

That said, we recently routed out a major document forger in our area. So, things ARE happening. It's just that you don't hear the good stuff...only the stuff that will keep the base away from the polls so the Dems can regain control and we won't ever have to worry about this problem again.

/That's my story