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.27 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.28
Growers have a long history of successful advocacy for access to foreign agricultural labor. In the past, they have asserted—incorrectly—that without foreign workers U.S. agriculture would face disaster. But anti-immigration activists and some elected officials dispute the argument that U.S. citizens will not work as field laborers.
There is, in fact, ample evidence that U.S.-born citizens will not replace foreign-born farm laborers at any realistic wage. “There have been a number of efforts to recruit non-migrant workers … and it has been very difficult to recruit and retain [them],” says Nancy Foster, president of the U.S. Apple Association. “Native workers do not show up for these jobs.”29
In 2006, the Washington State apple industry launched a campaign to recruit U.S.-born field workers. State and county agencies set up advertising, recruitment, and training programs for 1,700 job vacancies. In the end, only 40 workers were placed.30 Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, who helped run the recruitment program, said that the barriers to recruitment were simply part of the nature of farm work. “The domestic workforce … found work that was inside, less physical, out of the sun. And [work] that wasn’t seasonal so they didn’t have to look for another job when the apples were off the tree … [with] seasonal work you are always hustling to find the next job … that’s a stressor.”
Following the 1996 Welfare Reform legislation, which required work as a condition of the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) secured the passage of a program to place California’s welfare recipients in farm jobs in the Central Valley. State and county workforce agencies and growers’ associations collaborated to identify agricultural zones where welfare recipients could be channeled. But only a handful of potential participants were successfully recruited for farm labor.31
Manuel Cunha of the Nisei Growers League in California was involved in this recruitment drive. He explained, “There was a huge training program with the universities and the junior colleges to train these people [welfare recipients] in agriculture. Of 137,000 eligible workers, 503 applied and three actually went to work.” Cunha echoed Gempler’s comments on the barriers to recruiting citizens for farm work: “We are not going to train people in agriculture because it’s seasonal and because it’s too hard.”
In short, there is no evidence that removing immigrants from farm labor would create job vacancies that unemployed citizens would fill. If immigrant farm workers were no longer available, growers would likely try to mechanize their crops or abandon labor-intensive agriculture, leaving the United States to fill the food gap with additional agricultural imports.
Issues
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