Farmworkers protest anti-immigrant moves
Amid labor shortage, growers quietly root for rally against Trump
More than 200 farmworkers and their supporters marched in Santa Rosa on Sunday morning to protest President Trump’s immigration policies, which they say threaten both workers and the country’s thriving agriculture industry.
“Agriculture in California is huge, one of the state’s biggest industries,” said Juan Garcia, a United Farm Workers union coordinator who helped organize the rally. The growing immigration threats “could throw a wrench in that business by scaring workers into staying home.”
But what makes this labor protest different is that the growers who desperately need those
immigrant workers to pick their crops are quietly rooting for the demonstrators.
In recent years, heightened efforts to tighten border security, combined with changing demographics and economics in Mexico, have steadily trimmed the number of immigrants, both legal and those in the country without documentation, available to work the harvest.
“It’s been a persistent problem for the last decade-plus,” said Tom Nassif, president of Western Growers, a trade organization that represents family farmers in Colorado, Arizona and California. “We’re looking at every avenue we have to get an immigration bill to provide a road to legalization ... so workers don’t have to worry about being deported.”
While Trump’s call for a wall on the Mexican border and his promise of tougher dealings with undocumented residents have struck fear in many immigrant families, they’re far from the only reasons for the growing dearth of farmworkers.
A record 2.7 million people were deported during the Obama administration, and an improving economy in Mexico — and a slow U.S. recovery from the Great Recession — pushed many immigrants, legal and otherwise, to return to their home country.
A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that from 2009 to 2014, 1 million Mexicans and their families, including U.S.-born children, left the United States for Mexico, while an estimated 870,000 Mexican nationals came to the U.S.
“The labor shortage has ... been gradually been getting worse,” said Guadalupe Sandoval, executive director of the California Farm Labor Contractors Association. “As far back as 2012 or even 2010 there were reports that more workers were returning to Mexico than coming to the U.S.”
There are plenty of other reasons for the decline of the farm labor pool.
The birthrate in rural Mexico has fallen, so there are fewer large families with kids eager to find work in the U.S, recent studies have found. And the workers from those big families of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s who came to the U.S. as young men and women are older and becoming less willing — and less able — to do the backbreaking work of picking crops like strawberries and chili peppers.
“There also have been improvements to the Mexican economy, since some of those businesses Trump says left the country actually did move to Mexico,” Sandoval said. “A lot of California growers have moved operations to Mexico, where there’s cheaper labor and fewer restrictions.”
Those changes have been a problem, said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau.
“The (farm labor) system was designed for workers to go back and forth, coming to the country to work and then returning home when the harvest was done,” he said. “But since 9/11, it’s been much more difficult to come and go, especially come.”
Since workers now in the United States aren’t sure they will be able to come back to the jobs that are waiting for them, they’re more likely to put down roots in this country.
“And if people are now living in the country year-round, they may be looking for employment that’s less seasonal than farm labor,” Kranz added.
There also are far fewer migrant workers — laborers who follow the crops — than there used to be, Sandoval said.
“Most farmworkers have settled in, found their place, and they’re not moving,” he said.
With families staying in one place, the children of undocumented workers, many of them born in this country, can go to school and stay the year instead of being pulled out each time their family moved to the next harvest.
And as the children become better educated, “very few of that next generation want to work in the fields,” Sandoval said.
Not everyone agrees that there’s a farm labor shortage. For union leaders, what shortage there is could be solved if growers were willing to pay higher wages.
“It depends on the area, but (a labor shortage) is generally not a problem” in California, Armando Elenes, a vice president of the United Farm Workers union, said in a Bakersfield interview. “Most Kern County growers are still paying minimum wage, with a few paying a bit more.
“When it’s an issue of recruitment, you should see more competitive wages,” he added. Growers “are complaining, but they’re not competing.”
But growers argue that higher wages don’t bring more people into the farm labor pool; they only move the same group of workers from one farm to another.
With higher wages “all you are doing is incentivizing musical chairs,” said Nassif of Western Growers.
Even wages like $15 per hour for vineyard workers in the Napa and Sonoma areas aren’t enough to entice workers from other industries to move into the fields, where the workday is long, hot, hard and dusty.
California’s farmworkers will be getting a raise this year after Gov. Jerry Brown signed bills last year boosting the minimum wage and applying the state’s overtime rules to farm labor. And that’s also a concern for growers.
Those new rules are combining with the labor shortage to force changes in California agriculture.
“Growers are looking to move to crops that require fewer people to harvest,” Kranz said. “We’re not growing as much asparagus in California now for just that reason,” since the fast-growing crop needs lots of workers to harvest it at its peak.
“Growers are looking into increased mechanization and into changing crops,” he added. “There are a lot more almond orchards in California not only because the market is good and stable, but also because they need a lot less people.”
But the need for farmworkers isn’t going away as long as there’s a demand for fruits and vegetables that look perfect on the supermarket produce aisle and are too fragile to be picked by machines.
Sunday’s rally and march through downtown Santa Rosa, held on the weekend honoring the birthday of United Farm Workers union founder Cesar Chavez, was led by farmworkers carrying a banner reading, “We Feed You.” Others carried the redand-black UFW flags, along with signs saying, “Your Wine. Our Labor,” as they chanted “Chavez sí, Trump no.”
“The immigration crackdown doesn’t just hurt workers, but also growers and consumers,” said Garcia of the UFW. Sunday’s march was “a way of reminding people that the work we do helps the economy,” both by providing fresh produce to stores and by spending their paychecks in the community.
Even farmers sympathetic to Trump’s call for increased border security see the need for immigration changes.
Jason Giannelli of Bakersfield is a 31-year-old farm manager who argues that “we have to protect ourselves as a nation.”
But he also remembers that his great-grandfather came to the United States at age 14 and worked in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco before moving to the Central Valley to farm.
“We need to look at revising or revamping our immigration policy,” he said. “We need people who come here and work. Everybody got a start by coming to the U.S.”