Farm Workers and Immigration

While immigration reform, including passage of AgJOBS, is a long-term struggle, there is potential to improve the H-2A program more expeditiously, making it work better for growers, farm workers, and immigrant-sending communities in Latin America. “This is the only option that we are seeing to improve things right now on the ground,” said Diego Reyes, executive board member of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Three-fourths of hired farm workers are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. About half of all U.S. hired farm workers are unauthorized immigrants. Although immigrant farm workers have higher incomes in the United States than at home, they don’t always escape poverty as they had hoped. Hired farm work is among the lowest-paid work in the country. In 2006, the median earnings of these workers—$350 per week—were lower than those of security guards, janitors, maids, and construction workers. Only dishwashers were found to have a lower weekly median income.

FLOC works on guest worker recruitment, education, and training issues on the Mexican side of the border—but it doesn’t address the impact of the H-2A program on the Mexican communities that send these workers. In fact, this is one of the most under-analyzed parts of the H-2A program.

It is rare for anyone, including the Mexican government, to raise the concerns of sending communities. The reasons Mexicans leave home to become farm workers in the United States are often not part of this or most other discussions of immigration reform.

U.S.-born workers do not have much interest in farm labor, and it is not hard to understand why. Farm work is one of the most hazardous occupations in the United States. Workers face exposure to pesticides and the risk of heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and/or repetitive stress injury. Moreover, farm workers are not included in most minimum wage and hour guarantees. Most farm workers do not receive benefits, but some states with large numbers of farm workers, including California, Oregon, and Washington, provide wage and hour protections, as well as mandatory rest and meal periods over and above those mandated by federal law.

Fruits, vegetables, and horticulture make up a class of agriculture known as specialty crops. About 75 percent of all hired farm workers in the United States work on these labor-intensive crops. While California and Florida remain the largest specialty crop producers, specialty crops are grown across the country.

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath described the harsh working conditions of migrant farm workers from the Midwest. More than 70 years later, agricultural work in the United States is still often harsh and wages are low. But the composition of the farm labor force has changed. There are no more Okies. Instead, farm workers come from places like the Mexican states of Guanajuato and Michoacán. The majority of hired farm laborers in the United States are unauthorized immigrants, and most unauthorized workers are from Latin America—particularly Mexico. Spanish is the lingua franca of farm labor; 71 percent of farm workers identify it as their primary language.

In 2000, after decades of wrangling over the contours of an updated guest worker program, the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits and Security bill (AgJOBS) was introduced in Congress. It has been periodically reviewed and debated—but it has not been enacted into law.

Maria came to Florida para salir adelante—to get ahead. She arrived as a teenager in the mid-1990s, escaping a life of poverty on her family’s Oaxacan corn patch.