Mexican Workers and U.S. Agriculture: The Revolving Door

Abstract

Western U.S. agriculture is an industry that has shaped and been shaped by a peculiar labor policy: seasonal workers were outsiders who looked to agriculture for jobs, not careers. They did not plan to remain farm workers, and the industry and community in which they worked and lived did not see them as long-term settlers. The immigration and integration policy, in effect, was to recruit new workers willing to accommodate themselves to seasonal employment, and to avoid their integration in agricultural areas. Thus, for most immigrant workers, economic mobility required geographic mobility. However, the major policy issue is not how to enhance the upward mobility of immigrant farm workers and their children; it is how U.S. agriculture should gain access to immigrant farm workers.