Immigration and food safety

The linkage between immigration reform and food safety isn't often articulated. Is that because the argument is tenuous or that the linkage isn't commonly understood? Here is a comment from a grower, pubished here in The Buffalo News, and reprinted below.

Another Voice / Food safety
Immigration reform needed to protect U.S. produce
By Dennis BrawdyUpdated: 02/16/08 6:50 AM
The safety of our food supply was brought to the forefront in a recent scare due to a produce handler at a local Wegmans contracting the hepatitis A virus. As a vegetable grower in Eden Valley, I’ve come to watch these events with a lot of interest.
People obviously expect that the produce they purchase is safe and clean. After all, in the United States, we’re very focused on this. But what about the tomato grown in Mexico, or the avocado from Columbia? Would you ever know if the picker there had hepatitis? What if the packer had a gastric illness?
Do you believe these countries have the same sanitation standards? Yet today, a substantial portion of our food supply is imported, and no, they do not have the same standards.
Obviously, we all want a safe food supply. In the United States, many local growers are completing a very difficult certification from the Department of Agriculture in food safety and good agricultural practices. This program covers everything from worker training, sanitation practices and food handling standards to frequent audits and annual recertification.
This is important, and we want to be a part of it. Given recent scares with contamination of fresh produce, we recognize the need for a safe food supply. People want locally grown fresh produce with knowledge of how it was grown and handled.
In food safety, the United States has the highest standards in the world for domestic growers. Yet in our country, local growers are facing the greatest crisis we have ever faced in our business — the lack of a secure and legal labor force.
National estimates state that more than 75 percent of the agricultural work force is undocumented. The lack of practical immigration reform and enforcement- only policies have placed us and our livelihood at severe risk.
Due to this labor volatility, the Farm Credit Associations of New York have estimated more than 800 New York farms are severely vulnerable to failure, with total sales of $700 million per year, 750,000 acres of cropland and an estimated 15,000 jobs in the upstate economy on farms and in the farm sector.
The reality is these workers perform work that Americans do not want. Our workers are paid well, yet perform grueling, repetitive work in all types of weather and conditions.
In an economy that creates more jobs annually than it has new workers entering the work force, agriculture is left overwhelmingly reliant on an undocumented work force.
In the national immigration debate, calls for “no amnesty” and “send them all home” make wonderful sound bites on talk radio. Think about the results of this kind of rhetoric. Do we really want to force local growers out of business and increase our reliance on imported food?
Be careful what you wish for — the safety of your food supply may be at stake.
Dennis Brawdy is president of D&J BrawdyFarms in Eden

TK: All labor intensive agriculture shares in some of the same challenges in putting in place proper sanitation measures/food safety measures for their workers as they touch raw agricultural products, not to mention the environment's interaction with fruits and vegetables. The challenges are not unique to imported produce. To the extent the U.S. infrastructure and regulatory framework are more robust than any given farm in China or any other country, Brawdy's argument carries some weight. Yet to argue imported foods are less safe than U.S. food goes too far, in my thinking. We need immigration reform to provide a legal workforce for America's growers, and injecting food safety into the argument is not particularly germane to the debate.