Sunday, December 16, 2018

US Agriculture and the Dependence on Undocumented Workers


Agriculture is one of humanity’s oldest and most important technologies.  For most of our history crop production was characterized by a high concentration of labor.  It has been said that when we first began to organize into collective entities with industrial-scale grain production, the labor was so intense that workers essentially had to be enslaved by those in power to keep them from running away.  Humans, like plants and animals, had to be domesticated to accommodate the demands of agriculture.  Technology would improve over time and lessen the burden, but it would require the twentieth century inventions of fossil-fuel-driven machines to virtually eliminate manual labor.  Crops like corn can be planted and harvested with machines doing almost all the work.  However, there still exist crops that have resisted full automation and continue to require difficult and unpleasant labor.  Consider the humble tomato plant.  It produces numerous fruit over a period of several months, so it must be harvested continuously as the individual tomato reaches the right stage for picking.  This involves a lot of unskilled labor.

If owners of agricultural land had to pay a market price for labor, the cost of the produce might become too high to find buyers.  The traditional response of landowners was to resort to some form of servitude such as slavery, serfdom, or sharecropping.  Wealthy countries such as the OECD nations have high labor costs making labor-intensive agriculture relatively inefficient.  Since forms of servitude are generally highly restricted now, the only option is to seek guest workers willing to work at the lowest rate.  Often, this still does not provide cost-effectiveness and nations must decide if they wish to subsidize some of their agricultural products (or place tariffs on foreign produce) to allow them to compete in the marketplace.  No country wishes to be totally dependent on imported food from low-wage nations.  Consequently, some form of accommodation must be made to keep the price of desirable products tolerable.

Although, some of the founding fathers of the United States liked to think of it as a nation of small farmers, the most efficient early agricultural model involved large tracts of land worked by slaves.  After a huge amount of new fertile land became available after the Louisiana Purchase, the only people who could clear that land and put it into productive service were the large slaveholders.  This further entrenched the plantation model for agriculture in the southern regions.

The plantation system in the South produced cotton for the international market and provided the United States with the funds it could use to develop its other industries.  Not all the wealth became available to the plantation owners.  The North controlled credit and international transportation which siphoned off a considerable fraction of the profit.  The North also imposed high tariffs on imported goods to protect its fledgling industries.  Since the South devoted nearly all of its resources to producing cotton, the majority of its other needs had to be purchased from the North at above international market prices, further enriching the North at its expense.  The South has been instinctively in favor of free-market trade and has been mad at the North ever since.

After the end of slavery, large landowners tried to maintain the plantation model by various schemes to create indentured labor.  The South could resort to cheap black labor purchased from prisons, or they could reinvent the serf model and call it sharecropping.  Technology and mechanization would eventually change even that region.

There remain agricultural pursuits that still require difficult and intense labor.  These generally involve crops that must be picked by hand.  Michael Greenberg produced an interesting and revealing article on the state of agriculture in the Central Valley of California.  It was titled In the Valley of Fear and appeared in the New York Review of Books.  What is clear from Greenberg’s presentation is that the plantation model is still alive and well with undocumented immigrant labor taking the place of slaves.

“The revenue from all the crops harvested here and elsewhere in California is $47 billion a year, more than double that of Iowa, the next-biggest agricultural state. Most of this revenue benefits a few hundred families, some with as many as 20,000 or even 40,000 acres of land.”

“Plantations on the west side of the Valley are so huge that managers keep track of workers by flying over the fields in planes. Computers monitor the release of water, which is delivered to the plants with an intricate system of pipes and valves. ‘It’s prisons and plantations, nothing else,’ Paul Chavez, the son of Cesar Chavez, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union (UFW), told me. ‘You can’t even get an education in these places. According to the state of California’s own survey, in farmworker towns barely 30 percent of school teachers are accredited’.”

In the 1950s one could still find 10-15% of whites working the fields with the remainder being a mixture of minorities.  However, the nature of the work is such that now only the most desperate for employment will perform it.

“Today, at least 80 percent of farmworkers are undocumented Mexicans, the majority of them Mixteco and Trique, indigenous people from the states of Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Guerrero—the poorest regions in Mexico—who speak no or very little Spanish, much less English. Most of them have been working the fields for at least a decade, have established families here, and live in terror of la migra, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is called, and instant deportation or imprisonment that would wrench them from their children.”

It has often been claimed that undocumented migrants take jobs away from citizens.  Greenberg provides this perspective on that issue.

“In response to the argument that immigrants steal jobs from Americans by undercutting their wages, the UFW set up a website offering citizens and legal residents agricultural jobs anywhere in the country through state employment services. This was in 2010, during the Great Recession. The website received about four million hits, out of which around 12,000 people filled out employment forms. Of these, a total of twelve citizens or legal residents actually showed up for work. Not one of them lasted longer than a day. According to a Los Angeles Times report, Silverado, a farm labor contractor in Napa, ‘has never had a white, American-born person take an entry-level gig, even after the company increased hourly wages to $4 above the minimum.’ A wine grower in Stockton couldn’t lure unemployed citizens for $20 an hour.”

There are reasons besides money that make agricultural labor uninviting for those who might have other options.  Greenberg visited a tomato field and observed the picking.

“Because of the heat, the workday lasted from 5 to 10 AM, when temperatures rose to 113 degrees. The sun beat down, but everyone was covered from head to foot in several layers of clothes: cracked baseball caps anchored in place by hoodies and homemade scarves, sweatshirts over sweatshirts, two pairs of pants, heavy socks and boots; only eyes and cheeks and fingers were exposed. This was to protect against pesticides. Cancer rates among pickers throughout the Valley are high. The soil is so hardened by chemicals that it comes up in the hand in dry, pale stone-like clumps. In the heat the chemicals rise potently from the earth; within an hour I tasted them burning in my mouth.”

However, there are limits to what such workers will endure.  They do not allow their children to be caught up in the same system.

“Fruit and vegetable picking is a one-generation job—farmworkers I spoke to neither wanted nor would allow their children to follow them into the fields. The heat and physical toll, combined with the feudal power of the growers, make it preferable to work in an air-conditioned hotel or packing house, where you can stand upright and be free of pesticides for the same low wages.”

In order for owners to maintain a dependable supply of pickers there is a need for new illegal immigrants to replace those who are deported or are no longer able to do the job. 

“Since 2005 more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving. And this isn’t only because of a crackdown at the border. In 2000, when the border was far more porous than it is now, 1.6 million Mexicans were apprehended trying to cross into the US. In 2016 the number was 192,969.2 Ed Taylor, an economist at UC Davis, estimates that the number of potential immigrants from rural Mexico shrinks every year by 150,000. This can be partly explained by improved economic conditions in northern and central Mexico, which have dimmed the allure of minimum-wage labor in the US, and partly by the cost and danger of venturing across the border. If you do make it into the US, payments to a smuggler can keep a minimum-wage laborer in debt for life.”

The supply of pickers has not been keeping up with demand.

“As things stand, there is a labor shortage the magnitude of which hasn’t been seen in at least ninety years. It has prompted growers to rip out labor-intensive fruits like table grapes and plant almond trees, which require relatively few workers. Housing costs, especially in the Coastal Valley, have made it even harder to attract and keep workers. In recent years, millions of dollars’ of unpicked crops have been plowed under or left to rot in the fields.”

The growers would prefer that traditional system of employing migrants—legal or not—could continue.  But in the current environment where the Trump administration is attempting to deport everyone it legally can and make life so miserable for the rest that they will choose to leave on their own, that is highly unlikely.  This system could be replaced by a viable guest worker program, but that is complicated by the existence of the current, largely undocumented, workforce.  Could such a program recognize their need to maintain their jobs, income and families, or would it require that they all be deported to make way for the new system?  There is an existing program designed for “emergency” needs, but growers do not see it as a viable solution.

“Under the current guest-worker law, which is intended to address emergency labor shortages, guest workers are expensive: employers must pay for their travel from and back to their country of origin and provide housing during the term of their contract, which cannot exceed one year. The law is designed to discourage businesses from engineering a labor surplus by importing unlimited numbers of Mexicans and undercutting workers who already live in the US, as growers did under the Bracero Program (whose name comes from the Spanish word for manual laborer) from 1942 to 1964, in response to the agricultural labor shortage during World War II.”

That law seems to recognize the replacement and deportation of all current undocumented workers as an unacceptable solution.  There is a bill before Congress, that has not yet gained the number of supporters needed to pass, that illustrates the current administration’s approach to these issues.

“A bill sponsored by Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia seeks to weaken—and in some instances abolish—employer requirements, such as mandatory housing and transportation, in order to create a vast pool of two million or more regulated guest workers. Passage of the bill, its sponsors believe, will make it economically feasible to do away with hiring undocumented workers from Mexico and to deport virtually every one of them already living in the US.”

This passage describes the conditions of employment envisaged under the Goodlatte bill.

“Under the Goodlatte bill, guest workers could be hired for up to three years and would be paid the minimum wage in the state they are brought to—$7.25 in Texas, $8.25 in Florida, $10 in Arizona, $11 in California, all states that use a substantial number of farmworkers. Crucially, they would not be allowed to bring their spouses or children. And they could only work for the contractor who hired them. If they experienced wage theft or maltreatment on the job, they would have no recourse to seek justice or find work elsewhere. If fired, they would be immediately deported, at their own expense. If they fled, they would be hunted as outlaws. At least 10 percent of their wages would be withheld until the contract expired, to make sure that they left the country.”

Technically, such conditions would qualify as indentured servitude, but it should more properly be recognized for what it is—a modern form of slavery.  It is disturbing to consider that this nation was born accepting slavery as a viable social option, and now, after about 250 years of supposed social progress, there are those who would choose to return to such a system.  We were once a better nation than that.

The undocumented immigrants who have been working our fields were essentially invited here by the growers willing to hire them.  Any solution should allow those who have been good residents, paid taxes, and raised families to stay on.  Any guest-worker program should protect the rights of both existing workers and guests to tolerable conditions and provide recourse to legal means for redressing grievances.


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