When Woody Guthrie wrote his famous protest song lamenting the plight of California’s migrant farmworkers who, under Congressional authorization, were brought here during World War II to solve the problem of severe labor shortages, he could not have foreseen how California’s agricultural economy would one day become entirely dependent upon foreign labor. Today, the growing and harvesting of the state’s crops, including wine grapes, is achieved principally by citizens from Mexico and other Central American countries who are not legally authorized to be here.
Read the rest of this opinion piece at the Argus Courier.