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Following up on my most recent column about the Republican front-running Rudy Giuliani, let’s analyze two California pit stops he made this week in Del Mar and Anaheim to judge just how disinterested voters are in his candidacy.

During the same appearances, Giuliani revealed how insincere his so-called commitment to immigration reform is.

In Del Mar, a pathetically small crowd of 200 people showed up to listen to Giuliani even though he spoke at one of the most beautiful venues in California, the Del Mar Racetrack.

Del Mar, the heart of Ronald Reagan country, is thirteen miles due north of San Diego .

With San Diego’s population of nearly three million people, logic would dictate that more than 200 people would want to listen to the man who loves to be called “America’s Mayor.”

You could have found larger attendance at a Little League game. And with good reason–any baseball game, Little League or otherwise, would be vastly more entertaining than Giuliani.

What’s also interesting is that so few of the 4,500 Del Mar residents turned out.

Despite the fact that Del Mar is over 90 percent white and ultra-conservative Giuliani spoke only in passing about illegal immigration vaguely promising to end it. But in the same breath, Giuliani said that America is dependent on foreign labor. You know what that means: more guest worker programs!

In Anaheim, seventy miles up the road from Del Mar, Giuliani dodged questions about the role of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp and called for expanding legal immigration.

What Giuliani’s ninth swing through California proves is that there is little grassroots interest in his campaign and that he is not trustworthy on immigration.

Even if Giuliani makes ninety California trips, he’ll never carry the state in the 2008 presidential election

Mickey Kaus, who has been working the immigration beat very hard, looks at Arlen Specter’s gloating about the possibility of “crops rotting in the fields” and notes various attempts by the Administration to enforce the law so as to ruin the harvest. He suggests that first, if it does happen, then it’ll be Homeland Security’s fault, and second, that they could bypass the pickers and concentrate on industries that are, or used to be, more attractive to Americans.

It’s not true, contrary to DHS Secretary Chertoff’s claims, that one of the “consequences” of Congress not passing Bush’s semi-amnesty plan was a panic-producing crackdown. DHS could have kept doing what it had been doing, which is letting farmers hire the workers they needed to pick the crops while it concentrated on border security and industries where a supply of domestic workers (maybe at higher wages) was available. If there is a crop-rot-panic, it will almost by definition be intentionally induced by Chertoff. …

P.P.S.: Selective loose enforcement isn’t amnesty. It’s selective loose enforcement. Looking the other way on occasion–while cracking down in other areas and building up alternative, legal sources of labor–isn’t the same incentive to further illegal immigration as granting a formal path to legality and citizenship. … 9:31Crop Rot Panic - By Mickey Kaus - Slate Magazine

Even so, there are no crops rotting the fields yet. What there is, is a lot of farmers whining and complaining. This is a perennial bumper crop, which is unlikely to fail any time soon.

Here’s where I disagree with Mickey:why not let the crops rot in the fields, if that’s what it takes to control immigration? The farmers would also let them rot in the fields if there were a sudden fall in price below the cost of picking, as result of a bumper crop elsewhere or any other market cause. And if they suffer because they made all their planting and marketing plans based on a supply of cheap, illegal labor, tough luck!

It’s an economic decision, like the decision to abandon an unpaying mine.

No one but the growers suffers when the fruit rots. People will not starve for lack of table grapes,Granny Smith apples, and fresh strawberries.

Any fruit picked by hand is by definition a luxury. If you’re willing to consume your fruit in the form of apple sauce and strawberry jam, then it can be picked by mechanical harvesters, a technology seriously underdeveloped in the United States because of the huge supply of cheap labor. If you want fresh fruit, you may have to pay more.

But you’ll have to pay either way–every low wage immigrant who enters the country is a net loss on your tax bill. Better to pay a dollar extra at the supermarket.