Labor shortage, what labor shortage?

Anti-guest worker forces are stooping to ridiculous lows to achieve their goal to frustrate passage of immigration legislation. Here is a story from The Santa Cruz Sentinel that speaks of the latest volley in the fight.
From the story:

With Congress expected to revisit immigration issues this spring, Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for Fair American Immigration Reform, said if there were a shortage, then wages would be rising, not falling, typical of any commodity.
"Somehow there's this myth in the California ag industry that growers are having a hard time filling positions. We know they can always hire people. It's just a matter of whether they're ever going to pay higher wages and offer better working conditions"
Those are fighting words to some California farmers.
Area lettuce and strawberry growers say they have seen a notable decrease in the number of field workers at peak times over the past five years despite the fact that they've increased their wages — as much as $1 an hour, sometimes twice a year.
Pinpointing what farmworkers are paid is difficult. On average, field hands are paid between $7 and $15 an hour depending on their production and the crop, according to growers and worker advocates.
"Obviously, whoever's saying we don't have a shortage hasn't been in the field lately. It used to be there'd be 100 guys waiting in line for a job to pick for me," said Dick Peixoto, a lettuce grower in Watsonville and in the Imperial Valley, east of San Diego. "Nowadays, I have to search far and wide. Last summer, I had to let a whole field of lettuce go unharvested because I didn't have any workers"
Elia Vasquez, a longtime strawberry grower who serves on the labor committee for the California Farm Bureau Federation, said the number of farmworkers across the state was down as much as 30 percent last year as a result of tighter immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border.

TK: Surely this isn't how anti-guest worker/ anti immigration forces are going to position their opposition to AgJobs. Their claim that immigrant labor is more abundant than ever shows how patently wrong and uninformed their views are. That may in the end build broader support for comprehensive immigration reform.