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Officials in Colorado have decided to allow inmates from the state's prisons to harvest crops in fields that have languished since the state legislature adopted stringent anti-immigration laws.

Illegal immigrants fled the state, and, as a result, crops were rotting in the fields. Farmers couldn't find workers to replace the immigrants.

To alleviate the labor shortage, the Colorado Department of Corrections says it will contract to provide inmate workers for more than a dozen farms. The logic appears to be that convicted criminals who are American citizens are preferable to farm workers who are in the country without a work visa.

There is some logic to the argument, of course, but it makes some farmers nervous, as well it should.

"I've got young kids," Avondale, Colo., farmer Joe Pisciotta told the Los Angeles Times. "It's something I've got to think about."

More to the point, Pisciotta noted that "this prison labor is not a cure for the immigration problem; it's just a Band-Aid."

The problems in Colorado's agricultural industry were predictable. There have been numerous studies showing the degree to which farms in Arizona and elsewhere — not to mention the home construction industry — depend on migrant workers who are in the country illegally.

Cutting off the flow of those workers rather than creating a legal accommodation for them has consequences. Not many Americans are eager to spend long hours hunched over in lettuce fields working for low wages.

But putting inmates, even inmates considered low security risks, onto farmland and having them watched over by armed guards, is potentially dangerous.

It is also a way of evading and postponing a decision that must inevitably be made by Congress to deal with substantive immigration law reform. So far, the topic has been more a subject for political discussion rather than action.

In the absence of a guest-worker program that regulates the flow of seasonal workers on to the nation's farms and orchards, other states are likely to reach for solutions as desperate as that adopted in Colorado.

Until Congress acts, everybody loses — farmers, immigrant workers and the American taxpayers, who will be asked to pay for an ever-increasing law enforcement presence on the border.