CRANSTON

Ray Polseno stands in the cool air of his farm stand, one irritated apple grower.

He signs the delivery man’s bill for the chemical retardant that will keep his apples on the trees until his customers feel the urge to visit, then signs the electrician’s bill for the work on the lights over the peaches. All the while he’s crabbing about the local guy who hasn’t arrived to help his Jamaican worker pick and thin the fruit.

“Local help? Forget about it,” grouses Polseno, who has owned Pippin Orchard for 33 years. “You can’t get no local help these days to pick apples. They don’t know how to climb a ladder. They don’t know what a ladder is! And it’s too damn much work for ’em.”

Polseno’s salvation arrives riding a yard tractor and towing a trailer with eight wooden crates of early Macintoshes and Paula Reds that he’s just picked out back.

“Vinny, you’re gonna be by yourself,” Polseno reports. “Richard never showed up. And we might not get to the tomatoes today. The stuff just came in to spray on the trees. We’ll get that on this afternoon.”

“Yes, boss,” says Vinny, whose real name is Alman Smith, a 60-year-old farm worker whose faded cap shades his pensive eyes. A lean man with the fluid movements of someone half his age, he wears a flannel shirt and dark trousers tucked into high rubber boots, the toes wet with dew.

For the last 15 harvest seasons, Smith has left his home in Jamaica at the end of each July to live and work for three months on Polseno’s 18-acre orchard — one man in an army of about 1.6 million foreign workers who surge into the United States each year to pick the nation’s produce.

Smith, and about 10 other Jamaicans who work in Rhode Island’s two dozen apple orchards, are different from 70 percent of the nation’s other foreign farm workers: They are here legally.

There are, however, some illegal immigrants working at Rhode Island farms and horticultural nurseries, experts and farmers say.

As the peak of the growing season nears, the national debate over immigration is ripening as well in local orchards and at businesses that grow ornamental shrubbery.

The reason?

New immigration rules announced last month promise to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants.

The new regulations have local nursery owners worried that they’ll have to act as detectives to verify their workers’ Social Security numbers — and be left without enough help.

Local apple growers are rejoicing over the crackdown, saying that finally their chief competitors from the west, who routinely undercut their prices, may no longer have a cheap migrant labor force at their disposal.

Under the rules announced Aug. 10 by the secretaries of Homeland Security and Commerce, employers will have 90 days to resolve discrepancies between the Social Security numbers their workers provide — the most common and often fraudulent document offered as proof of residency — and the records at the Social Security Administration.

If they can’t resolve the discrepancies, the employers must fire the worker. (In California, a coalition of labor and immigrants’ rights groups last week filed a federal suit to try to block implementation of the rules.)

“This is a big topic right now for us,” says Ken Lagerquist, executive director of the Rhode Island Nursery and Landscape Association, which has 350 members, several of whom hire dozens of Mexican and Guatemalan workers.

“If all of a sudden these people are sent back because they are illegal,” says Lagerquist, “it’s going to put a few companies seriously out of business.”

IN THE BUREAUCRATIC world of tracking guest workers, landscape and nursery laborers who work here legally often enter through what’s called the H2-B program. Like hospitality workers who arrive through the same program, they receive a special temporary visa to live and work in the country. Apple pickers and others who harvest food fall under the similar H2-A program.

Those hired through either program have been carefully screened by immigration officials here and in their host countries. Both programs require prospective employers to first advertise for local workers. If the jobs can’t be filled locally, then they are allowed to hire guest workers from other countries.

According to records from the state Department of Labor and Training, 184 foreigners are working in Rhode Island nurseries and landscaping companies this year.

But since the industry employs more than 5,700 people each year, Lagerquist concedes that some of them have probably supplied fraudulent documents.

“What are we going to do? Hire a detective to find out if these guys are legal or not?” asks Lagerquist. “The federal government is going to have to pass some kind of immigration law that would make these people legal.”

Lagerquist declined to give the names of any association members to talk about their work force, saying none of them want the publicity.

BRUCE VANICEK is a fourth-generation owner of Rhode Island Nurseries, in Middletown, which currently employs about 55 field hands. He hires about 20 more during the busy spring planting season.

“We’ve got one-third who are Portuguese, primarily from Fall River, another third … Puerto Rican, which is not an issue because they are citizens, and then about one-third who are Guatemalan.”

The nursery runs buses each day into Providence and Fall River to pick up workers at job pool sites. Vanicek says most of his field hands are regular employees. Each has provided a Social Security card. But could some of his workers be illegal?

“It’s a real possibility,” he says. “I’m no expert in finding fraudulent Social Security cards.”

Vanicek says he’s not looking to employ cheap workers — the average wage at his nursery is $11 an hour — he’s just trying to find enough workers.

“We don’t even advertise for employment opportunities much any more because we really get no response from looking for field laborers,” he says. “We’ll get people in off the street sometimes who apply for a job. We’ll say, ‘Great, come in next Monday,’ and most never show, which makes you wonder if they’re really looking for a job or are they looking for a job just to tell unemployment [officials] they are looking for a job.”

Vanicek says there’s a public perception, which he hears at times, that he doesn’t pay his workers much.

“People assume because these guys are working out in the fields that they’re not making any money, because in this country we don’t really honor hard work. Your task here, it seems we are taught, is to find some cushy job and put your feet up and suck off the system.”

But Vanicek says his workers, besides making about $3.50 above the state’s minimum wage of $7.40, are also paid overtime after more than 40 hours a week, and receive nine paid holidays a year and a pension.

It’s not bad money, he says, if you’re willing to work.

And right now, there are more foreign people willing to do the work than Americans.

“If the country could magically just eliminate every illegal who was working here,” he says, “the country would be crippled.”

THE NEW ENGLAND Apple Council, based in Goffstown, N.H., is working with 189 farmers in the six-state region this year who hired guest workers through the federal H2-A program.

Despite its name, the council fills all kinds of agricultural jobs. This year, the council made arrangements to bring in about 1,600 guest workers from other countries. Besides picking apples in the various states, they are also picking tobacco in Connecticut, vegetables in New Hampshire and herbs for one grower in Maine.

With the federal government now set to crack down on employers using illegal workers, “we’ve had a lot more inquiries into H2-A this year,” says Joe Young, the council’s executive director.

“They’re concerned that their current work force may not be available and they will need to look into alternatives to harvest their crops.”

Young doesn’t believe the new regulations will have a big impact on Rhode Island produce growers — not as it might in New York state or for the big apple growers out West.

Orchards in those states have for decades relied on migrant workers who follow the ripening fruit north, many of whom are illegal and who make minimum wage.

The New York Apple Association represents more than 670 commercial apple growers in the state. Those growers are expecting big crops this season but are worried about having enough pickers, according to a New York Times story last month.

Now with the fear of tougher immigration laws, New York growers, like apple growers in California and Washington state — which produces much of the nation’s supermarket apples — may have to turn to a more legal, and expensive, work force.

Which is just fine with Sandy Barden.

“They are definitely crying now,” she said.

Barden and her husband, Gilbert, have run Barden Orchard, in North Scituate, for the last six years. Each year, they have hired a Jamaican worker, Easton Williams, now in his mid-60s, to help pick their fruit.

It’s the kind of expense Western states don’t have, which is why “they can sell their product so cheaply,” she says. “They come in here and undercut us. It’s a little irritating.”

Allan Hill shares that sentiment.

“I’m pissed,” says Hill, the president of the Rhode Island Fruit Growers Association, whose family has run Hill Orchards, in Johnston, since 1929. “I have the point of view of: I’m legal, so why isn’t everyone else legal?”

As he has for the last dozen years, Hill has hired two Jamaican men through the H2-A program to tend his 25 acres of apples.

The process, besides being fraught with red tape, is expensive.

Growers must pay for the workers’ transportation to and from Jamaica and provide housing for the months they are here. They must also pay for their immigration-processing fees, the costs of advertising for local help and the New England Apple Council’s $400 annual dues. On average, it costs an apple grower $1,745 to have just one worker show up to start picking, the apple council says.

And once the workers are here, the growers must agree to pay a wage substantially above the minimum wage — this year the rate is around $9.50 an hour. The apple pickers also get time and a half for work beyond 40 hours a week.

So while Western apple growers rely on a cheap and largely illegal work force with the government’s tacit approval, Hill says, his harvest starts by shelling out money before the first apple is picked by legal workers.

“These are expensive people and we’re doing all this stuff and the guys down South and out West don’t have to,” he says. “The state labor department makes me toe the line. They come out here to make sure we have the right housing. Why isn’t this going on out West?”

Hill says the last time his apple farm could rely on local pickers was back in the 1960s, when a few mills were still operating. Third-shift mill workers would arrive in the morning to pick apples and get paid by the bushel before they went home to sleep.

It was a chance for them to make some extra money for a few months in the fall.

“The problem is it’s part-time work,” says Hill. “Who wants to work a few weeks a year? The other problem is it’s hard work.”

And the prospect of hard work, he says, “seems to be more of a problem than the part-time.”

BACK AT PIPPIN Orchard in Cranston, Alman Smith stands atop an aluminum ladder amid the sprawling branches of a golden delicious tree laden with too many immature apples.

In the past, the boss had two or three other Jamaican workers in the orchard as well. He can’t afford them anymore.

Smith reaches for each apple. No, he says, he’s not lonely.

He lifts the apple in his hand and then presses his forefinger against the stem until it snaps. It is the proper way of removing an apple, he says, without damaging the stem, which bears next year’s bud.

The apple makes a soft thump as it hits the grass.

These rows of trees have too many apples on them, Smith explains. He must thin them so the remaining apples will grow big enough for sale.

The discarded fruit he will dump in the woods. What the deer don’t eat will rot away.

The prospect of more fruit rotting on the nation’s vines and branches lingers.

tmooney@projo.com