Angie Chuang, The Oregonian
Surrounded by shiny new tractors, Carl Capps spends most days talking about horsepower, hydraulics and transmissions. He paid little attention to anti- and pro-immigrant-legalization activists who marched at the state Capitol.
Then the immigration debate came to him last fall, after he sold a quarter-million-dollar machine that harvests wine grapes—the first in the Willamette Valley.
The New Holland Braud grape harvester can do the work of 40 handpickers in a fraction of the time.
Suddenly, vineyard owners were calling Capps to schedule demonstrations, saying they couldn’t cope with worsening worker shortages—or immigration raids. Their concerns were heightened after a U.S. Senate immigration bill that would have offered legal status for up to 900,000 undocumented agricultural workers failed, and immigration officers detained nearly 200 workers at a Portland produce processing plant.Oregonians for Immigration Reform, a restrictionist group, touted the European machine as a beacon of a future without illegal labor.
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2007/07/picker_puts_ste.php