Column: Trump’s promised deportations are on a collision course with a California economy built on hypocrisy

This country has always had a hypocritical relationship with the undocumented workers who keep America’s agricultural, construction and hospitality industries humming. Can’t get more essential than that.” In the mid-1980s, when he managed cantaloupe fields, federal government pilots would fly small planes over the state’s cropland looking for large crews of workers, he recalled. The pilots would radio information about the workers to the ground, where vans full of immigration officers would storm farms to, as Del Bosque put it, “capture as many as they could.” One raid he witnessed ended in tragedy. But I don’t think anything ever came of it.” Human Rights Watch reported that from 1974 to 1986, 15 migrant farmworkers were known to have drowned in Central Valley canals during immigration raids. In fact, the odds that an employer will face an inspection by immigration authorities, my colleague Don Lee recently wrote, “are even less than a taxpayer’s likelihood of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.” Lee’s story focused on E-Verify, the computer-based program that allows employers to check a prospective employee’s legal status easily, almost instantly and free of charge.