Agriculture was a major stumbling block to immigration reform, largely because Congress was unwilling to assign explicit priorities to the competing goals of protecting American workers and admitting supplemental immigrant farmworkers. This article describes the Special Agricultural Worker or SAW legalization program that generated 700 000 applications in California and the hypothetical calculations required to determine whether Replenishment Agricultural Workers or RAWs will be admitted to the US to do farmwork. The paper concludes that immigration reform did not resolve the century-old debate over agriculture's "need' for alien workers; instead, SAWs and RAWs have contributed to the harvest of confusion on farm labor. -Author

[No Keywords available]

evaluation Americas economics population social policy demography Population Dynamics Agricultural Workers Agriculture Developed Countries policy USA agricultural labour United States North America Manpower Needs labor migration California health care manpower Health Manpower Western Hemisphere Article migration developed country Demographic Factors Emigration and Immigration Evaluation Studies Economic Factors farmworkers Transients and Migrants Northern America immigration reform Human Resources public policy employment Labor Force Migration Policy Population Policy