One evening, while on the air doing my talk radio broadcast, I brought up the topic of immigration. A pear farmer in Lakeport, California, named Nick Ivicevich called. He had to step outside for better reception on his cellphone.

As we spoke, you could hear periodic dull thuds in the background. No pattern to them. Thud. Thud-thud thud.

I finally asked him, Nick, what is that Im hearing in the background?

Those are pears rotting off the trees in my grove out here, he said.

You could hear the angst and frustration in his voice.

I waited my whole life for a crop like this, he said.

It was his best pear-crop in 45 years of tending the trees in his grove, but like other Lakeport growers, his fruit rotted by the ton because he couldnt find enough pickers to harvest them. Nick lost nearly two million pounds of pears.

Not long afterward, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the plight of pear growers in Lake County, a region about 90 miles north of San Francisco and a part of California ideally suited for the crop. The accompanying photo of one family farmer sobbing into her hand as she stood before thousands of rotted pears on the ground was heartbreaking.

That was in 2006. Nick died seven years later at age 77, but the situation for growers hadnt changed. It was even worse. Pamela, Nicks daughter, had taken over the 122-acre orchard that had been in the family since 1960.

Pears are labor-intensive crops, hand-harvested, Pamela said. We need a program that makes it easy for growers to hire people who know how to do this work without them worrying about how to get here to do it.

Every grower I have spoken to would agree, yet every grower I have ever spoken to, has blamed Washingtons inability to craft a sensible, reality-based immigration reform policy.

Therein lies the heart of the matter: Immigration is a problem no one wants to solve. And Im beginning to wonder if anyone in Washington even knows how to solve it, or worse, even wants to.

Take Title 42, the public health border policy implemented during the pandemic. It allowed authorities to swiftly expel migrants at U.S. land borders. Since it was enacted in March 2020, authorities have expelled nearly 7 million border crossers.

And what about now, with its expiration?

Its going to be chaotic for a while, President Joe Biden told reporters last week.

I suspect many feared images similar to those Black Friday shoppers of yesteryear. Friday morning, 6 a.m., the store opens its doors, and the shoppers, camped outside for days, flood inside like a cattle call. Chaos.

Stores took measures to ease that shopping rush with sales at the beginning of Thanksgiving week and opening their doors on Thanksgiving night. Online shopping has eliminated much of that mayhem, but you get the point. Retailers took countermeasures to make the process more gradual.

I would have liked to see them phase out Title 42 far earlier, former director of border management on the National Security Council Andrea Flores told NPR . To not see them formally try and end it till long after we had testing, vaccines, and other mechanisms in place to deal with the public health concerns, they really lost some time to build out a more orderly process for the people who have been waiting for two, three years to come and work, reunite with family or seek asylum.

So far, though, we havent seen throngs of people storm into the country, suggesting that the problem might be more manageable than some had feared.

That might not matter, though. From a political standpoint, the issue wont be defined by whats happening on the ground. Itll be defined by those seeking ways to exploit it. Thousands of people may come through the system smoothly, but if even a single flashpoint occurs, any mishap, any glitch will be blown out of proportion by the agendized to make that single moment a poster child for the entire effort. And that will reflect badly on the Biden administration, fairly or not and the task of crafting a broader, sensible, comprehensive immigration policy becomes that much harder.

There may be a reason why no one wants to solve the immigration problem: Politically, the problem is far more useful than a solution.

Washington has not passed a single major piece of immigration legislation into law since 1986, with the Immigration Reform and Control Act (often referred to as Simpson-Mazzoli, the two lawmakers behind the bill, and yes, they were from different parties. Bipartisanship. How quaint!).

Countless efforts have failed, and with an increasingly fragmented society where it is difficult to achieve agreement on the common good, and a dysfunctional political system where extremists and special interest groups can control legislation, the likelihood of reform seems remote at best.

A bill introduced in Congress in 2019, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act , would have relieved the problems faced by both undocumented workers and growers in desperate need of their labor, but the bill died somewhere in the congressional ether earlier this year.

Yet lawmakers love to say how much they love the farmer while the nations agriculture sector seems most directly impacted by our failed immigration policy debate.

Californias 70,000 farms employ some 450,000 people at peak harvest. A $50 billion industry annually, it is the nations largest agricultural sector and the sole producer of many specialty crops, such as almonds, artichokes, figs, garlic, olives, raisins, rice and walnuts. It is also home to some of the worlds finest wines.

Figures vary, but its estimated that anywhere from 60-75% of Californias farmworkers are undocumented. Across the nation, nearly half of Americas farmworkers lack documentation.