Over the weekend, I received a copy of an article written by Larry Craig for the Idaho Farm Bureau Quarterly.  His arguments for a guest worker program have reached new heights of absurdity:  In the article he said:  

“The oldest baby boomers will begin to retire in 2011.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics cites farmers on the top 10 most likely to affected when boomers stop working”. 

That was a surprise.  I didn’t know that boomers were engaged in farm work in such a big way.  Or perhaps he means that baby boomers will stop eating when they retire.  It’s not clear. 

He also said,

“More than 78 million make up this generation of individuals born between 1946 and 1964.  Who will replace them when they stop working?”

The first time I ever heard the term ‘baby boom’ was in the 1960’s.  I remember it clearly because my birthdate fell at the tail end of it.  I was born in 1951 and the cut-off at that point was 1952.   The funny part is that they’ve increased the date range so much; they’ve almost included the boomer’s children in the boomer generation.  Which brings me to another point.   

To listen to the propaganda regarding the baby boomers, you’d think that procreation stopped with the WWII era parents.  Here is some news… the baby boomers DID have children so the world won’t stop when the baby boomers retire - IF they ever they do get to retire which is not entirely clear.   

The corporate frauds of the 90’s stole the retirement of millions of baby boomers.  In addition, the massive export of high tech knowledge jobs caused the layoff of millions of boomers in their mid-life with only Walmart jobs as the replacements.  It doesn’t take long to run through the assets of a middle class worker when the rug has been pulled out from under them. 

Craig conveniently ignores the fact that we’ve got between 20 and 30 million illegal aliens already in this country - so why do we need 'guest workers'?  In fact, an Idaho state press release said the following:  

Hispanics accounted for one of every six new people in Idaho from mid-2004 to mid-2005, giving the state’s largest and fastest growing minority 9.1 percent of the total population, new Census Bureau estimates show.

The state’s Hispanic population grew by more than 4.8 percent during the latest 12-month estimating period that ran through June 2005, twice Idaho’s overall population growth rate of 2.4 percent during the same year-long period.
 

If farmers can’t find workers - it’s not because we don’t have enough illegal aliens here to work the fields.  It is that the ones who are here are taking the jobs that Americans do want - not the jobs that Americans don’t want. 

Larry Craig also quoted a lobbyist for the tomato growers who is still using the old and tired mantra, “crops rotting in the fields due to shortages of farm workers”.  Coincidently, a couple of years ago I did some research on a man named Harris Miller because of his work for the Information Technology of American Association (ITAA).  From the profile I wrote on Miller: 

Harris Miller is an immigration lobbyist who made his name in labor arbitrage when his firm, Immigration Services Associates was hired in the 1980’s as a consultant/lobbyist for the National Council of Agricultural Employers.  In 1982, the Council raised a million dollars for the campaign of George Deukmejian.  “Between 1983 and 1990, Deukmejian began shutting down enforcement of the state's historic farm labor law. According to the UFW: “Thousands of farm workers lose their UFW contracts. Many are fired and blacklisted”. 

During that period, Miller used a strategy of propaganda to create the image of ‘shortages’, which he then used as evidence to lobby for the increased supply of imported migrant farm workers.  He supplied the media with stories "fields full of crops, just lying there, rotting in the sun because of the 'crisis' of a 'shortage' of farm workers."  He then used that as evidence to lobby lawmakers to allow massive importation of temporary farm workers from Mexico to ‘save the crops’ thereby breaking the United Farm Workers Union. 

In 1995, Harris Miller became president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). Since that time, he has honed his strategy of ‘shortage’ and lobbying for remedies.  With the big money backing of the Information Technology corporations - (400, 11,000 or 26,000 members depending on who he is talking to), he not only helped flood our labor markets with foreign workers, he used a massive media propaganda campaign to create the image of a shortage while at the same time, he was working proactively to export our high tech sector to India.

‘Shortages of workers’ is ‘The Big Lie’ of our generation.  The truth is human slave trade has been resurrected. The concept is encoded into the WTO - GATS trade agreements under the label of ‘Free Movement of People’ - meaning that corporations have been given control over immigration to our country for work and they are using foreign workers to arbitrage wage rates against the American people - to drive wages down to slave labor levels to ‘compete’ with China.

The agreements are that multinationals like Microsoft, Citibank, Dow Chemical, Pfizer, etc. get to do business in the third world countries - in exchange for importing the third world starving masses to our country.  It’s a double whammy for America - the loss of good jobs for Americans - plus the flooding of our labor markets with desperate people to take jobs from us on our own soil.