Agriculture has been the major side door and backdoor through which unskilled immigrants have entered the United States for the past half century. If the 1980s' immigration patterns continue in the 1990s, up to one-fourth of the working-aged U.S. immigrants who arrive during the decade may have their initial U.S. employment in fruit and vegetable agriculture. Immigration reform was expected to reform agriculture's revolving-door labor market. By legalizing the farm workforce, it was hoped that legal workers who did not have to compete with a continuing influx of illegal aliens could force farmers to improve wages and working conditions. Farmers, in turn, would stop planting labor-intensive crops in remote areas and expect the U.S. government to admit or tolerate the entry of immigrant workers to harvest them. The immigration reforms have proven to be a case of good intentions gone awry. Instead of a legal farm workforce, 20-40 percent of today's farm workers are unauthorized. Most farm employers did not make adjustments to retain newly legalized farm workers; instead, more farmers sought newly arrived and often unauthorized immigrant workers.
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References
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A California farm spokesman in 1872 observed that hiring seasonal Chinese workers who housed themselves and then “ `melted away' ” when they were not needed made them “ `more efficient... than negro labor in the South [because] it [Chinese labor] is only employed when actually needed, and is, therefore, less expensive' ” than slavery. Quoted in Fuller, The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California, in U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Education and Labor (LaFollette Committee), 1940, pt. 54, p. 19809.
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2. U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1992, p. 833. Data are for 1988.
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3. Ibid., p. 649. There were 2.1 million farms with a gross cash income of $186 billion in 1990. The largest 107,000 farms each sold farm products worth $250,000 or more, and they accounted for 56 percent of gross cash income. The smallest 1.3 million farms each sold farm products worth $20,000 or less, and they accounted for 5 percent of gross cash income. These small farms lost $500 million farming.
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4. Farm worker data are notoriously unreliable. Seasonal fruit and vegetable agriculture appears to employ between 1 and 2 million workers annually, and almost all of the 200,000 to 300,000 new workforce entrants each year are immigrants. There are some U.S. citizen children of immigrant farm workers who also enter the farm workforce, but most are farm workers only as teenagers.
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5. About 600,000 legal immigrants entered the United States annually during the 1980s, and 50 percent, or 300,000, joined the labor force, including about 5 percent (150,000 of 3 million) with farming occupations. The Effects of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy and Labor Market (Washington, DC: Department of Labor, International Labor Affairs Bureau, 1989), pp. 25 and 27. About 80 percent of the 1.8 million general legalization applicants were in the labor force (1.44 million), including 80,000 farm workers (5 percent). All of the 1.3 million applicants under the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program should have done farm work in the mid-1980s. The Immigration and Naturalization Service indicated in March 1991 that it would approve only 910,000, or 71 percent, of these SAW applications.
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6. U.S., Senate, Congress, Serial J-97-61, 1981, p. 78.
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7. Ibid., p. 125.
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8. The FLA included 22 farm organizations, from the CA Grape and Tree Fruit League to the Washington Asparagus Growers. Many farm employers on whose behalf the FLA lobbied belonged to 2 or more of the organizations that in turn constituted the FLA.
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9. A SAW applicant, for example, could have entered the United States illegally in early 1986, left after doing 90 days of farm work, and then applied for SAW status from abroad. An applicant was permitted to apply for the SAW program with only an affidavit from an employer asserting that the worker named in the letter had done 90 days of work in virtually any crop. The burden of proof then shifted to the INS to disprove the alien's claimed employment.
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10. Group I SAWs did at least 90 days of Seasonal Agricultural Services (SAS) work in each of the years ending in 1 May 1984, 1985, and 1986. Group II SAWs, by contrast, did 90 days of SAS work only in the year ending 1 May 1986. Over 90 percent of all SAW applicants were in the Group II category.
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11. Philip Martin, Edward Taylor, and Philip Hardiman, “California Farm Workers and the SAW Legalization Program,”California Agriculture, 42(6):4-6 (Nov.-Dec. 1988).
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12. There were newspaper reports of labor shortages and rising wages in the wake of IRCA, but they turned out to be isolated exceptions. For example, a story in the Wall Street Journal noted that growers complained of too few strawberry pickers in California and too few cucumber pickers in North Carolina, and a U.S. Department of Agriculture representative attributed instances of wage increases to the problem of finding adequate labor. “Labor Letter,”Wall Street Journal, 5 Sept. 1989.
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13. These calculations are described in Philip Martin, “The Outlook for Agricultural Labor in the 1990s,”UC Davis Law Review, 23(3): 499-523 (Spring 1990).
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14. These studies are summarized in Commission on Agricultural Workers, Final Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992).
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15. The Department of Labor's National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS), which probably includes a disproportionate share of the long-season and year-round workers who do most of the days of farm work done by hired workers, reports that median earnings in 1989 were $75000 for 37 weeks of work. These SAS workers were young (median age 30), male (three-quarters), foreign-born (three-quarters), and poorly educated (median of six years of education; three-quarters could not read English well). SAWs are about 40 percent of the NAWS sample, and post-IRCA “documented illegals” are about 10 percent. Findings from the NAWS: A Demographic and Employment Profile of Perishable Crop Farm Workers (Washington, DC: Department of Labor, July 1991).
