Buoyed by a weekend of marches and rallies across California, farmworker representatives say they’re not losing faith they can reach a compromise on immigration reform even though the Senate adjourned for its spring recess without passing the bill they had promised.

Thousands of United Farm Workers supporters marched in Yakima, Wash., Coachella, Bakersfield, Fresno, Santa Rosa and Oxnard this past weekend. In Salinas, the march took off from Cesar Chavez Park at about 1 p.m. Sunday, made its way around the Alisal for about two miles and returned to the park nearly two hours later.

"We had great marches all over the state; there’s great excitement and hope," said Giev Kashkooli, third vice president for the UFW. "We’ll have 150 people going to Washington D.C. in two weeks. We’ve never had that many to engage in lobbying. I’m feeling things are moving forward, it’s really exciting."

The rallies are aimed at boosting support for immigration reform, at a time when negotiations are taking place in Washington, D.C., to revamp the country’s immigration laws.

But talks snagged last week over disagreements on a proposed guest worker program. Business representatives want flexibility on hiring workers abroad, and labor representatives want to make sure this ability does not result in lowering wages for local workers.

"A lot of growers are lobbying for legislation rules that contain the minimum wage," as the wage that would be offered to foreign workers, said Bruce Goldstein, president of Washington, D.C.-based Farmworker Justice. "That’s unfair because the minimum wage isn’t necessarily (what would make) U.S. workers accept the job."

What Goldstein and other farmworker supporters fear is that, if the wage for guest workers is set too low — and they believe minimum wage now is not high enough — growers will be able to create artificial labor shortages, saying that they can’t find workers.

And once more harvesters are invited to work at the lower-set rates, the wages will be lowered for everyone else, farmworkers advocates say.

"Once you bring a bunch of guest workers to an area, (employers) will not offer any higher wage rates, only prevailing wage," Goldstein said "The employer by definition is allowed to offer the wage rate the government said they had to offer. If they offer the wage rate and the U.S. worker says ‘I want 10 cents more,’ the employer is allowed to say ‘You’re not available because the government says I can only offer the prevailing wage.’ The only thing the worker can do is organize, which does not happen very often."

What happened during the World War II-era bracero program is an example, Goldstein said. The guest worker program, enacted to combat labor shortages, was set to a prevailing wage, and employers would not offer pay higher than that.

What’s surprising about current negotiations is that it was Ronald Reagan, an admired Republican, who set the rules now in place for the existing guest farmworker program growers want to eliminate, advocates say.

In effect, some farmworker advocates believe growers are using the immigration reform process as a tool to lower wages.

"Some growers are very reasonable, but (the argument is) in exchange for legal status, you need to be willing to get paid less," Kashkooli said.

Claudia Meléndez Salinas can be reached at 753-6755 or cmelendez@montereyherald.com.