By Gene Hall

Last week I was in Washington, D.C., and had the pleasure of interviewing U.S. Representative John Carter, who represents the 31^st District of Texas. Congressman Carter, along with fellow Texas Congressman Sam Johnson, is working hard on the U.S. House version of an immigration reform bill for our country.

It takes some Texas-sized courage to stick your neck out on a heated issue like immigration reform in Congress. For agriculture, though, a legal guest worker program is the difference between harvested crops and lost opportunity. No workers in the field… No crops from the field… No food for the people.

By Gene Hall

Agriculture’s shortage of labor is two things: a potentially devastating crisis for our home-grown food supply, and an opportunity to compromise post-election.

There I go again with that ugly “C word.” I can hear now all the spines snapping into rigidity as folks prepare to enforce their own version of ideological purity. 

Agricultural labor is all tangled up in the issue of immigration. Seldom has there been a more important issue that people absolutely refuse to be reasonable about. I ran in this space last week an excellent description of the agricultural labor crisis from American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman. If we don’t find a way to get agricultural workers into the fields, dairy barns and livestock operations, crops and livestock will be grown in countries where there are workers.

By Gene Hall

Imagine a championship boxing match. Two heavyweights come to the ring. They talk, smile, touch gloves and retreat to their respective corners. The bell rings. However, neither boxer approaches his opponent to begin the contest. Instead, they throw things at one another: the stool, the water bucket and a blizzard of insults, negative comments and outrageous claims about their own skills, most of which they decline to use in a productive way.

By Gene Hall

Immigration is one of those issues that almost always cause an eruption of emotion.  Emotion is the wellspring of our humanity but it can be the enemy of reason.  This is the case with immigration reform.

The two poles of this debate stand light years apart.  On the one side are the advocates of open borders and unlimited services to waves of poor people leaving unfortunate circumstances.  Some in this camp lobby for an easy path to citizenship, believing these immigrants will vote in a predictable way.  On the other side are those that advocate an enforcement only policy.  They believe that the estimated 12 million people here illegally should be found, rounded up and ejected by whatever means necessary.  Both sides are wrong.