OK farmworker compromise

San Jose Mercury News: Comprehensive immigration reform is down for now, tripped up by election-year politics and the refusal of the Bush administration to translate concepts into legislative specifics.
Life still breathes, however, in one piece of reform -- an excellent compromise dealing with farmworkers. But it could use help from the president to shove it past legislative bottlenecks and to encourage key Republicans, like California's Rep. Richard Pombo, to support the bill.
The bill, sponsored by Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., would grant protections and legalized status to immigrant agricultural workers, while giving growers what they want: a predictable, steady supply of help. That's why the Agricultural Job Opportunity Benefits and Security Act has the backing of business and labor, Latino activists and a bipartisan group of congressional liberals and conservatives.
America's crops and fruit would rot, were it not for illegal immigrants, who make up most of the nation's agricultural workers. They and their families live in the shadows, vulnerable to predatory coyotes who shuttle them across the border and contractors who put them to work.
Work permits
President Bush has proposed granting them renewable, three-year work permits. The Kennedy-Craig bill would go further, by offering the estimated half-million undocumented farmworkers now in the country the opportunity for permanent residency -- a green card -- if they continued to work regularly on farms over the next three to six years. Their families could move here, with conditions; they could travel freely to Mexico, where most are from.
Future farmworkers wouldn't be eligible for green cards, but they would be guaranteed decent housing, prevailing wages and other rights under a revised H-2A temporary visa program.
The bill ... would provide rights and safeguards to the nation's most exploited workers. A nod from Bush would move the bill along.