As Congress tackles immigration reform and resentment of laborers from Mexico swells, few are facing the real nature of the crisis.

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Agriculture remains the state’s biggest industry, producing about $27 billion in annual sales. Yet some anti-immigrant legislators and leaders seem willing to sacrifice it for the sake of keeping out undocumented Spanish-speaking people born south of the border.

“As long as there’s not an unemployment rate of zero, the issue isn’t a lack of labor, but how much growers are willing to pay their workers,” McClintock says.

McClintock argues that the best way to solve the current labor shortage is to deport all undocumented immigrants, and oblige farmers to pay high-enough wages in the fields so that unemployed Americans can become farmworkers.

“The issue here is that legal immigrants are coming to America, they are coming in obedience of the laws, and they are assimilating into American society,” McClintock says. “And illegal immigration undermines that. What agricultural industry leaders are really saying is that they don’t want to pay American laborers what the market requires in order to make a buck.”

McClintock calls farmers who hire undocumented foreign workers “opportunists,” and says “such people are beneath contempt.”

Another hard-line activist says the US should simply abandon agricultural crops that require cheap labor.

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, DC—an anti-immigration think tank and lobbying group—says the country can import those same agricultural goods from Third World countries.

“We can have the Mexicans pick strawberries harvested in Mexico instead of importing them to pick the strawberries here,” Krikorian says.

“We have a large, flexible economy, and the idea that high school drop-outs are a precious natural resource that we need to import, because we’re running out of them, is silly.”