Harvest of Confusion: Immigration Reform and California Agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture was a major stumbling block to immigration reform, largely because Congress was unwilling to assign explicit priorities to the competing goals of protecting American workers and admitting supplemental immigrant farmworkers. This article describes the Special Agricultural Worker or SAW legalization program that generated 700,000 applications in California and the hypothetical calculations required to determine whether Replenishment Agricultural Workers or RAWs will be admitted to the United States to do farmwork. The paper concludes that immigration reform did not resolve the century-old debate over agriculture's “need” for alien workers; instead, SAWs and RAWs have contributed to the harvest of confusion on farm labor.