What do you do when your immigration crackdown leads to a labor shortage?

Apparently, do as Colorado has decided to do, and buy hire yourself some convicts to do the work.

Ever since passing what its Legislature promoted as the nation’s toughest laws against illegal immigration last summer, Colorado has struggled with a labor shortage as migrants fled the state. This week, officials announced a novel solution: Use convicts as farmworkers.

The Department of Corrections hopes to launch a pilot program this month — thought to be the first of its kind — that would contract with more than a dozen farms to provide inmates who will pick melons, onions and peppers. [Full story]

It sounds kind of iffy to me, honestly. I’m not the only one, either:

“If they can’t get slaves from Mexico, they want them from the jails,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors restrictions on immigration.

Ricardo Martinez of the Denver immigrant rights group Padres Unidos asked: “Are we going to pull in inmates to work in the service industry too? You won’t have enough inmates — unless you start importing them from Texas.”

Farmers said they weren’t happy with the solution, but their livelihoods are on the verge of collapse.

“This prison labor is not a cure for the immigration problem; it’s just a Band-Aid,” farmer Joe Pisciotta said.

He said he needed to be sure he would have enough workers for the harvest this fall before he planted watermelons, onions and pumpkins on his 700-acre farm in Avondale. But he’s not thrilled with the idea of criminals working his fields.

“I’ve got young kids,” he said. “It’s something I’ve got to think about.”

The most interesting part of the article, though, is the graphic sidebar, which notes that Mexican and other Latino immigrants have lower incarceration rates than native-born citizens (yep, even white citizens). Additionally, immigrants don’t take jobs from native-born citizens. Is anyone really surprised that O’Reilly and his ilk have been lying about this? ‘Cause I’m totally not.

Thursday Poem: The Lost Sister

The Lost Sister

She was a master of childhood, very green,
very given to play, very sleepy, very grit of gray.
I, I was a shadow in a tree for no one to see,
I was a piece of ice in a tidal sweep.
When she laughed the sea made order of disorder.
I was a shadow in a tree, a stain
along the thawing bough for no one to see.

In her life, the hours pass casually.
Snow continues to pile on snow,
the dust in the corners of the old farmhouse
grows like mice in the winter.
I, I was the snow that fell too soon,
before the ground had frozen enough to catch me
and make me stick.

Meghan O’Rourke
The Kenyon Review

I love this poem, and have loved it since the day I first read it, even though it made me raw inside. I wanted to share it.

What the hell, I’ll share a secret, too. The first time I read this poem, I cried, because I’m the stain no one sees, and I have a sister and a whole family — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — who don’t know I exist, and will probably never know I exist. And knowing that, I’m stuck in this place where I can’t move on and I can’t go back.