Rural America is on an immigrant labor treadmill

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.magicvalley.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_6acfa50e-5d93-5eee-b328-5b10a64e4e95.html

By Philip Martin | Posted: Sunday, November 29, 2009 1:00 am |

(Editor’s note: The following are excerpts from agriculture labor economist Philip Martin’s book “Importing Poverty: Immigration and the Changing Face of Rural America,” just published by Yale University Press):

… The farmworkers of tomorrow are growing up today somewhere outside the United States, making immigration policy a major concern of farmers, farmworkers and agricultural communities. … most of the newcomers in rural America have not finished high school. The question is whether these newcomers and their children will become a poor underclass …

The immigrants in rural and agricultural areas often lack both education and legal status. About 5 percent of the 150 million U.S. workers are believed to be unauthorized, but the percentage of unauthorized farmworkers is higher, topping 50 percent of seasonal workers on crop farms. The share of unauthorized workers in other farm-related industries, from food processing to meatpacking, is generally thought to be about 25 percent, which is five times the U.S. average.

U.S. farm labor and immigration policies did not anticipate a rising tide of poorly educated and unauthorized workers in rural America … policymakers in the 1960s anticipated a wave of mechanization that would eliminate most farm jobs, making it their primary responsibility to help farmworkers and their children transition to nonfarm jobs. By the mid-1980s, it was apparent that the number of farm jobs was stable and the share of unauthorized workers filling them was increasing. The response to the unanticipated increase in unauthorized farmworkers was an easy legalization program, which signaled to farmers that foreign workers would continue to be available. Increased planting and ineffective enforcement opened the floodgates and allowed Mexico’s rural poor to spread throughout North America …

Farmers have long worried about whether there would be enough seasonal workers available to harvest their crops. Over decades, they convinced themselves and the federal government that the solution was to reach over borders and find workers for whom U.S. wages were a godsend. The alternative, allowing wages to increase enough to attract U.S. workers, would likely have reduced the demand for farmworkers well before U.S. workers stormed the fields.

The major program through which farmers could obtain guest workers … H-2A, presumed that most farmers could hire U.S. workers to fill their jobs. However, in the exceptional circumstances when U.S. workers were not available, the U.S. Department of Labor would certify a farmer’s need for legal guest workers.

Certification satisfied sugarcane farmers in Florida and apple growers along the Eastern seaboard, where there were no farmworker unions and few groups opposing guest workers. However, growers in the Western states feared that the United Farm Workers and other unions would send workers in response to the recruitment efforts they were required to undertake, and they would be faced with the choice of hiring pro-union crews or being sued for not hiring U.S. workers. Thus, Western farmers insisted on a noncertification path to hiring legal guest workers …

FULL story at link.

[doc03]

1. Back in the 1950's and 60's us kids in the country worked

in the hay fields and picked apples in the fall. Farmers can't find kids today that will do that kind of work, they want to work in the mall where they don't get dirty. I'll take that back the Amish still work on the farm.

[JDPriestly]

2. Right. And also, back in those days, homeless tramps were hired

as day laborers. Now we just house homeless in city slums.