It looks to me and every other intelligent person reading this article like the definition of illegal immigrant has now extended to include those with work visas granted by the US embassies in the immigrants country of origin even when it clearly states above and in the Bloomberg piece that visas had been granted or denied in Murphy’s case

Typically 95% of these workers will do one season of harvesting and return home. It is certainly not out of financial necessity that I or any of the others I worked with wanted to do this job, like Thomas Murphy we came over as interns to learn about American agriculture.

A job on the harvest run may not have been glamourous to many or even well paid but it was for almost everybody a once in a lifetime experience that all had wanted to do for some time before actually getting the chance to do so. I really enjoyed working and travelling the width of the USA from Texas up to the Canadian border and back.

The friends I made then and the fun we had I will never forget. Looking back now the experience of working in a quite often dirty and hot, stressful and sometimes dangerous environment for long hours at the time pushed me to my limits and I proved to myself that I could work 14-18 hour days for months on end. As a young person it benefited me greatly. It was a great experience I would love to repeat however it is a job for single young men and women with no responsibilities.

America, and many other first world countries like Ireland and the UK I might add, are going to have to chose between cheap home produced agricultural produce subsidised by cheap foreign labour and not so cheap imported produce which brings absolutely nothing to rural economies or the economy as a whole. Sadly it seems that once again bigotry and not reason has won out.