Farmers hope for Mexican workers they desperately need

The sun hasn't cracked the horizon when Alfredo Betancourt and 19 of his countrymen line up behind a packing trailer, knives in hand, knee deep in dewy cauliflower plants.

A tractor growls, the packing trailer jerks into motion and Betancourt and his co-workers begin their routine - walk, stoop, cut, toss, walk, stoop, cut, toss.

By the time the dense fog lifts from California's Salinas Valley, the crew has cut enough cauliflower to fill a dozen produce aisle bins at a local grocery store.

They will crisscross this and dozens of other fields eight hours a day, six days a week, for nine months, sleeping three to a room in hotels long since shunned by tourists. Come December, they'll board a bus and return to Mexico. Richer, they hope.

More than 11,000 foreign guest workers such as Betancourt were approved last year to harvest the lettuce, fruit and vegetables for California's $47 billion agricultural industry - a fivefold increase from 2011, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of U.S. Labor Department data.

If this year's hiring pace holds, that number will continue to rise.

Consumer tastes for fresh strawberries and leaf lettuce - two of the state's most labor-intensive crops - have driven the boom along a coastal corridor from the Salinas Valley in Monterey County through the Oxnard Plain in Ventura County, according to the Times analysis.

In the Santa Maria Valley alone, the number of agricultural guest workers rose from six sheepherders in 2012 to more than 2,000 laborers last year.

If growers have their way, they will get even more under the visa program known as H-2A and face fewer barriers, delays and regulations.

To do so, they will have to ask President Donald Trump to put an asterisk on his 'America first” economic agenda, which promises to crack down on immigration as a way of opening up jobs for Americans.

'I think he has the same philosophy that we've had for years, and that is, If you let them in the front door, they won't have to sneak around and go through the back door,” said Tom Nassif, president and CEO of the Western Growers Association and a member of Trump's agricultural advisory committee.

Nassif said the president is ready to swing open the 'big, beautiful door” he promised in his border wall, even before he builds it, and even as he threatens to crack down on visas for high-tech jobs.

'It's the only option out there,” said Steve Scaroni, owner of Fresh Harvest, the state's biggest contractor of guest workers. 'There is no other option.”

That's because nonimmigrant Americans are not eager to pick crops, despite wages that are rising faster than the state average, according to a Times analysis.

Meanwhile, the largely immigrant farmworkers already here - half of whom are believed to have crossed the border illegally - are getting older and moving to other jobs, or lying low in fear of deportation.

And they're not being replenished with other immigrants. The border has become too difficult to cross, Mexico's birthrate has plummeted and new economic opportunities have opened for the rural population that used to leave for the United States, immigration experts say.

Growers say foreign guest laborers have largely kept their crops from rotting in the field - though several growers have lost millions of dollars over the last few years.