The Senate this week will debate a $238 billion farm bill, and there was the prospect that yet another amnesty for illegal aliens, this one for farm workers and their families, would be attached to it. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) was considering introducing the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits, and Security Act of 2007 (AgJOBS) as an amendment to the bill (it was also one section of last summer’s failed amnesty proposal).

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The bill would put on a path to citizenship, 2 to 3 million farm workers and their families, though only after a three- to five-year period of indenture on American farms. It’s one of those “both stupid and evil” bipartisan deals, originally agreed to several years ago by both the farm worker advocates and the growers, and brokered by leftist attorney Rick Swartz.

The immediate prospects for its passage aren’t good, since both Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), chairman of the Agriculture Committee, and the White House are against adding AgJOBS to the farm bill — not because they’re against amnesty (Harkin has a grade of D from Americans for Better Immigration), but because it might hold up all the goodies they want to pass out. Or, in the polite formulation of the acting Agriculture Secretary, “The farm bill should be more limited in scope.”

Whatever chance the bill might have this week comes from the belief on the part of many lawmakers (and voters) in the claims of agribusiness lobbyists, about the pressing need for a continuous flow of foreign peasants to pick vegetables. The most sweeping claim was from lobbyist Sharon Hughes: “We are either going to have our food produced by foreign workers here in the United States, or the farming process will move to foreign countries.”

The lobbyists’ “crops are rotting in the fields” story line has been repeated often and with little to back it up. This is one of those stories into which reporters buy so wholeheartedly, that they find no reason to actually check it out — like church burnings, or “Jeningrad.” The New York Times, of course, is the gold standard for this sort of thing, though it’s quite widespread (here and here are two examples picked at random).

Since only two percent of Americans still work in agriculture, many of the rest of us fall for this baloney. The research in this area, however, paints a very different picture. In a new paper, published by my Center for Immigration Studies, agricultural economist Philip Martin of the University of California, Davis, finds “little evidence” to support claims of a labor shortage on America’s farms.