On Illinois farms, where labor is tight, foreign workers are welcomed
ALTO PASS, Ill. _ Wayne Sirles parks his dusty pickup among rows of peach trees, where Mexican pickers pluck fruit that a few years ago would have dropped to the ground to rot for lack of hands to harvest it.
Not this year. Sirles, whose great-great-grandfather founded Rendleman Orchards in the tiny town of Alto Pass in southern Illinois, has for the second season hired temporary foreign workers through the government's H-2A visa program, stanching a loss of crops that threatened the viability of his family's 144-year-old farm.
He didn't want to. Determined to avoid the costs of the program, Sirles put up flyers in high schools, grocery stores and restaurants looking for local summertime help to pick peaches and apples.
But nothing came of the effort, he says. The family tried to work with the labor they had, but production got unsustainably low.
"We went for three or four years resisting the H-2A program because we thought we could do it, but we could not," says Betty Sirles, Wayne's mother. Now Rendleman's team of 30 pickers includes 12 foreign workers on temporary visas who toil in the muggy midsummer heat alongside longtime employees but return to Mexico at the end of the four-month harvest.
