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Show Growers face Picker Shortage Many Utahns will remember the problems encountered by the state's sweet cherry growers a year ago, when insufficient labor to pick the crop resulted in as much as 25 percent of some growers' cherries winding up rotting on the ground, a farm organization official recalled today. He warned that the same thing could happen again and again unless a satisfactory solution to the farm labor situation is found. "The answer to labor problems for Utah fruit growers and other farmers with crops requiring a lot of hand labor over a short havesting season is to begin a program to bring in needed aliens on a temporary basis, said Frank O. Nishiguchi. He is president of the Utah Farm Bureau Federation "While only a minority of illegal aliens are employed in agriculture, some farmers far-mers employ them because they are willing to work and have the motivation to improve themselves and their families," the farm leader explained. The American Farm Bureau Federation has recently proposed a seven-step seven-step program to help reduce the flow of illegal aliens. It includes: (1) Granting amnesty to aliens who can prove they have been gainfully employed in this country for a period of years; (2) issuing tamper-proof, tamper-proof, non-counter.eitable I.D. cards to those workers; (3) setting up a farm labor contract between the U.S. and Mexico-and other labor-surplus labor-surplus countries-which would work around present cumbersome Department of and spokesman for 14,804 member familes. "Much of the problem last year was that fruit growers unknowingly hired illegal aliens for their picking crews because the workers had Social Security cards. When the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) conducted an unusually high number of spot checks of 'green cards,' they located some illegal aliens whom they returned to Mexico, but also scared off many legal workers who didn't like the hassle," he added. "Farmers have no way of investigating legality of these workers, and putting put-ting the burden of proof of their legality on the farmers just isn't fair." Nishiguchi pointed out that many jobs in American agriculture demand skill and physical stamina to such a degree that few Americans are willing to perform them. The program also would include: (4) Insisting that present law be enforced making it illegal for the Social Security Administration Ad-ministration to issue a Social Security card to an illegal laien and requiring that agency to make a careful check of any alien's background; (5) making it illegal for public officials to provide services (such as food stamps or welfare payments) to an illegal alien except in emergencies; (6) improving INS funding to help slow down the flow of illegals, once amnesty was declared; and (7) greatly increasing and enforcing penalties on those who smuggle aliens into the U.S. Nishiguchi explained that the old bracero program with Mexico was opposed by this nation's labor unions and other opponents, who succeeded in ending the program several years ago. No workable program has come into being since then; an INS procedure for getting alien help in to harvest crops through applications and other requirements is hopelessly complicated and slow, farmers assert. |