Featured letter: What’s wrong with this picture?

On your story regarding the problem North Fork farmers are having in hiring people to help with the crops and the harvest, this is just a small part of the entire attitude of workers in today’s American welfare state.

A person who is out of work in New York can receive up to $405 a week, or $21,060 a year, for doing nothing except sitting home watching television. A person who is on welfare in NYC can also sit at home doing nothing except watching television, even while welfare provides the equivalent of an hourly pre-tax wage of $14.75, or $30,680 a year.

All while people who are not a citizen of this country, and are here to make enough money to support their families back home, wherever that might be, labor for a $12/hour salary working in 100-degree heat.

So the farmer on the North Fork is caught on the horns of a dilemma, where on one hand he is unable to get Americans to do the farm work and, on the other hand, there is less and less foreign labor to do the same work at equivalent costs.