Rogue River Journal

"Work that can't be exported and few Euro-Americans are willing to do - picking crops, cleaning our homes and offices, bussing and washing dishes in restaurants, tending our gardens, even raising our children - is performed by poor immigrants, many of them here illegally. We depend on these workers even as we decry their presence, while scarcely slapping the wrists of the many employers who illegally hire and often exploit them. More than a fourth of the food on American tables is raised in the Great Central Valley of California, and almost all of it is cultivated and picked by Mexican-Americans, Mexicans, other Latinos, and Filipinos. We get the fruits and vegetables; they get the meager wages and stooped backs, they breathe and absorb the pesticides of which we consume only traces, and they get the cancer." John Daniel