Farmers feel immigration crunch

CELAYA, Mexico — Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

Farming since he was a teenager, Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in California's Imperial Valley, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexicans and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

"I'm as American red-blood as it gets," Scaroni said, "but I'm tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue."

A sense of crisis prevails among American farmers who rely on immigrant laborers, more so since immigration legislation in the Senate failed in June and authorities announced a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants. An increasing number of farmers have been testing the alternative of raising crops across the border where many of the workers are, according to growers and lawmakers in the United States and Mexico.

Western Growers, an association representing farmers in California and Arizona, conducted an informal telephone survey of its members in the spring. Twelve large agribusinesses that acknowledged having operations in Mexico reported a total of 11,000 workers here.

"It seems there is a bigger rush to Mexico and elsewhere," said Tom Nassif, the Western Growers president, who said Americans were also farming in Central American countries.

Precise statistics are not readily available on American farming in Mexico, because growers seek to maintain a low profile for their operations abroad. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., displayed a map on the Senate floor in July locating more than 46,000 acres that American growers are cultivating in just two Mexican states, Guanajuato and Baja California.

"Farmers are renting land in Mexico," Feinstein said. "They don't want us to know that."

She predicted that more American farmers would move to Mexico for the ready work force and lower wages. Feinstein favored a measure in the failed immigration bill that would have created a new guest worker program for agriculture and a special legal status for illegal immigrant farm workers.