to gain legal status, while US employers would get an expanded temporary worker program.     The Mexican government would still like to see both elements, but in the wake of September 11 the Bush administration and its Congressional allies have made it plain that legalizing undocumented workers is not on the table.  At a March press conference, just before meeting with Fox in Monterrey, Mexico, Bush said he was opposed to any kind of amnesty.  "Here's my attitude," he said. "I think what our country ought to do is help match any willing employer with any willing employee."  That's White House shorthand for a contract labor program, seemingly the only element of immigration reform on which Bush and Fox can agree.     So Garcia's memories don't just describe a distant past, but a rapidly approaching future.     "We slept in big bunkhouses," he remembers.  "It was like being in the army. We woke up when they sounded a horn or turned on the lights.  We'd make our beds and go to the bathroom, eat breakfast, and they'd give us our lunch -- some tacos or a couple of sandwiches, an apple and a soda.   When we got back to camp, we'd wash up and eat..  Picking tomatoes, you really get dirty, like a dog.  If we wanted to go into town, in Stockton there was a Spaniard who would send busses out to the camps to give people a ride.  He was making a business out of selling us shirts, clothes, and medicine."     Since Garcia's bracero days, that situation has deteriorated, rather than improved.  Today, in most parts of California, and increasingly in other states as well, growers no longer want to house the workers who come to harvest their crops.  "They want to force workers to be on their own," Goldstein says.  It's common now across the country to see parked cars on the outskirts of farm worker towns with whole families sleeping inside.     The current H2-A program, however, still contains a requirement that growers provide housing to the contract laborers they bring into the country.  And the barracks or trailers they provide to workers are inspected -- in theory.  But in the fall of 2000, in negotiations over a possible expansion of the program, agribusiness associations proposed scrapping this.     "With a big expansion of the program, it's unlikely there would be the resources to inspect housing.  But what they sought in negotiations," Goldstein recounts, "was a change in H2-A, in which they would no longer actually have to provide it.  Instead, they could give workers a housing allowance, if the government certified that there was no housing shortage."     The barracks of Garcia's memory might be preferable to what such an allowance could buy today, given that the housing supply is more limited in farm worker communities (especially during harvest) than in almost any urban area, and that the condition of that housing ranks at the bottom.  In fact, grower insistence on eliminating the requirement might even backfire, according to Goldstein.  "You can imagine that a lot of people in rural communities would freak out if growers simply dumped a contract workforce on the local housing market, even right wing people," he speculates.     But housing is only one element of living conditions. Another is food.  Garcia remembers that the food in the camps was often bad, and that one year, one of the workers in his crew died of food poisoning.  "Something he ate at dinner in the camp wasn't any good," he recalls, "but what could we do?  We were all worried.                       [Continue.....]