In an immigration crackdown, who will pick the produce?
WHO PICKS your strawberries?
If you haven’t delved into this question, you probably believe it’s virtually all immigrants, many of them illegal, because Americans don’t want to do those jobs and we don’t have enough legal ways to get foreigners here to do them.
If you have delved into the question, you know that’s absolutely true.
Estimates of the number of farmworkers employed in the United States vary. According to Robert Guenther, senior vice president for public policy for the United Fresh Produce Association, a produce industry trade group, it’s about 1.5 million to two million.
Of those, a large portion is illegal. Again, estimates vary, but Guenther puts it at 50 to 70 per cent, a wide range. The Department of Labour, in its National Agricultural Workers Survey, puts it at 46 per cent.
No matter which estimate you accept, it’s a lot of people. And the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws and promise to build a wall to keep more people from crossing the border illegally threaten the viability of the on-farm workforce.
If we lose the workers who are here illegally, it’s hard to see how they’ll be replaced, because Americans are reluctant to take these jobs, particularly the ones harvesting crops. There’s a lot of evidence for this, both anecdotal and statistical, including a particularly compelling case study done in North Carolina in 2011. That year, 489,000 people were unemployed statewide. The North Carolina Growers Association listed 6,500 available jobs. Just 268 of those 489,000 North Carolinians applied, and 245 were hired. On the first day of work, 163 showed up, and a grand total of seven finished the season. Of the mostly Mexican workers who took the rest of the jobs, 90 per cent made it through to the end.
Lynn Jacquez, a District of Columbia lawyer specialising in immigration law, says, “There’s sufficient evidence that over the last 30-plus years there’s a dearth of US workers that want to go into this field.” Whether the pun is intended, these jobs are acceptable only to people who have very few, very bad options.
The work is brutally hard. Ricardo Salvador, who is director of the food and environment programme for the Union of Concerned Scientists, and whose family includes farmworkers, described a typical day to me. ( I tried to talk with a farmworker directly, but the political environment has made many very reluctant to speak with the press.)
Days often begin in the middle of the night - say, 3 am- to leave enough time to get to a pickup point (a parking lot or vacant lot), be picked up, and get trucked to the worksite.
Each crop is different; you’re stooping to pick (fruits like strawberries) or cut (vegetables like broccoli) essentially nonstop, usually with pressure to keep up with a truck that’s collecting the harvested produce. If you fall behind, you could get kicked out and lose both a day’s wages and a ride home. Conditions vary, of course, but there are often very limited breaks.
“It’s not just the physical stress,” says Salvador. “It’s the psychological stress. You have to keep up, you can’t afford to lose this job.”
And the pay? Between US$ 10 and US$ 12 an hour, generally. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes less. But, because there isn’t year-round work, according to Salvador, “these families are earning US$ 10,000 a year.”
It is disconcerting that two different scenarios, one threatening to farmworkers, one supportive of them, could have a similar effect in our food system. The threatening scenario is a restriction of the labour force driven by immigration enforcement.
According to both Guenther and Jacquez, that force is already shrinking, in part because of enforcement under the Obama administration, but also because better conditions in Mexico reduce the incentive to come here, and the aging workforce isn’t being adequately replaced. This has put pressure on the sector, which has boosted competition for labourers and raised wages in some places. Stepped-up efforts to close the border, combined with the ongoing aggressive effort to deport people who are here illegally, would increase that pressure.
The supportive scenario looks very different. Many US produce buyers would like to see the people who bring our fruits and vegetables out of the fields work in decent conditions and earn family- sustaining wages, a situation that could be brought about by legislation (including minimum wage and immigration reforms), collective bargaining, or both. —