Roberto Hinojosa Fernandez, an H-2A picker, clips stems on Fuji apples at Valicoff Orchards near Wapato, Wash., in 2018. Farmers are forced to hire guestworkers because of a lack of Americans who want the jobs.

It is not often that we find ourselves speechless, but when it comes to the fiction that foreign guestworkers are taking agricultural jobs from Americans, there really isn’t much to say.

But, rest assured, we shall do our best.

The Washington Employment Security Department last year tried to fill the ranks of tree fruit pickers and other related jobs. The department sponsored job fairs, posted the jobs online and used radio, social media and other means to advertise and recruit workers.

Here’s the scorecard of how the department did:

Number of workers needed: 34,000

Numbers of workers the state recruited: 11

To its credit, the department did recruit more workers than it did the previous year, when it found none.

For employers, the department’s efforts provided a reality check and allowed it to certify that there aren’t enough workers.

This was not news to farmers in Washington state. Over the years, they have tried all sorts of ways to recruit American workers, up to and including hiring prisoners.

What they have found is that many Americans are big on talk, but tend to head back to town when it comes to hard work.

Ask anyone who has tried to hire employees for any position. Americans just aren’t lining up for jobs — especially those that involve hard work. Our suspicion is that Uncle Sam has been so generous in recent years that working has lost its attraction. Why work when you receive money for having a pulse?

What the department accomplished with this exercise was to disprove the following statements:

Foreign guestworkers take jobs from American workers, and it’s cheaper to hire guestworkers than Americans.

Various special interests regularly cough up those fantasies as “proof” that farmers are working against Americans.

The only problem is that every aspect of those fantasies is factually wrong and illogical.

For example, before farmers can even think about hiring guestworkers, they must advertise for American workers. Only after they come up short and the state certifies that fact are farmers even eligible to seek guestworkers through the federal H-2A visa program.

They first must submit a temporary labor certification application to the U.S. Department of Labor and Form I-129 to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service.

Then the prospective workers outside the U.S. must apply for a visa from the U.S. Department of State at a U.S. embassy or consulate in their home country.

Once the employers and guestworkers have jumped through those hoops, the farmers have to pay to transport the guestworkers to the farm, supply housing and pay at least a minimum wage set by the U.S. government. In Washington state, the minimum wage for H-2A guestworkers is $17.97 an hour.

Washington state’s minimum wage for other jobs is $15.74 an hour.

Considering all of that, what possible incentive would a farmer have to hire guestworkers in lieu of hiring Americans?

The next time someone regurgitates the fantasy that guestworkers are replacing Americans as fruit pickers, hand them a bag and a ladder and put them to work.

Let’s see how they do.