Commentary:
By Andrew Wainer
“Those who labor the earth are the chosen people of God.”—Thomas Jefferson
The House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement held a hearing a couple weeks ago on the H-2A agricultural guest worker visa program—a program that, like much of our current immigration system, isn’t optimal but has proved doggedly resistant to reform.
The H-2A program was created in 1986 and is the latest version of the United States’ seasonal agricultural guest worker program that dates back to the farm labor shortages of World War Two.
Although the United States was founded on the ideal of the family farm, the country has always used foreign labor as part of its food production, beginning with plantation slavery. Today it’s impossible to assess the nation’s food production system without taking immigrants into account.
More than any economic activity in the United States, agriculture has become dependent on immigrants, specifically unauthorized immigrants. The latest surveys find that more than half of all crop workers are unauthorized. Overall, immigrants comprise at least 75 percent of the nation’s approximately 1.3 million crop workers.
Our dependence on immigrants goes back more than a century. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 meant that family-based farm labor couldn’t meet the needs of growing agricultural operations seeking to supply larger portions of the population.
Increasingly driven by technological change and growing national and international markets in the 20th century, farms grew and became mechanized as machines replaced animals (and later, people).What is less understood is that while farming became mechanized, the agricultural labor force was also becoming largely foreign-born, as native-born agricultural laborers moved to towns and cities for more and better job options.
At least as early as the 1880s, seasonal farm jobs were losing their appeal for Americans. At first, agricultural workers came from Asia and Europe, but, spurred by the two World Wars, the United States launched several recruitment programs—the Bracero Program being the most famous—to bring agricultural guest workers from Mexico.
Today the agricultural system’s reliance on immigrants is an established fact. Spanish is the de facto language of the agricultural labor force, with 84 percent of farmworkers claiming this as their native tongue. Growers—not to mention those in the dairy, livestock, and meatpacking industries—say Latino workers keep their food businesses alive.
Numerous attempts to entice U.S. citizens back into the agricultural workforce—including by California in the 1990s and Washington state in 2006—have failed.
Citizens have shown for decades that they aren’t interested in agriculture: Less than 2 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. While we may still possess folkloric visions about farms and enjoy the bounty of agrarian life, we don’t want to participate in it.
So an agricultural guestworker program that allows immigrants to work in the United States, help their communities back home, and keep America’s food system operating makes eminent sense.
But that’s not what we have.
Both growers and farm worker advocates say the current system is a failure. Growers say the H-2A program is too bureaucratic and doesn’t allow them to contract the workers they need on a timely basis. Only a fraction of growers—maybe 10 percent—actually use the H-2A program; most rely on unauthorized workers who respond to market signals much faster than federal agencies.
Farm worker advocates also criticize the H-2A program for its lack of protection for farm laborer rights. And since there isn’t an effective legal mechanism to integrate immigrant workers into the agricultural economy, many workers struggle live in legal limbo unable to circulate in their communities without fear.
Immigration critics lament our dependence on foreign workers, saying that Americans have become lazy, unwilling to do the dirty work and too dependent on government support. But relying on foreign labor is common around the world in both rich and poor countries. Western Europeans rely on Colombians, Moroccans, and Poles—among many other nationalities—to perform seasonal work harvesting crops and caring for livestock. Canada has a similar system that draws on temporary laborers from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Even in El Salvador, where immigration to the United States has created a labor shortage, poorer neighboring countries such as Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala provide an estimated 200,000 unauthorized agricultural workers.
The need for immigrant labor in agriculture is a given—to some degree. Discussion of this issue shouldn’t center on unrealistic programs that deport immigrant workers en mass and replace them with American workers willing to work in the fields. These people don’t seem to exist.
Instead, we should think about how to make our agricultural guest worker program more humane and economically effective for both workers and growers, so that our agricultural economy, rural communities, and immigrant families all benefit.
Wainer is political analyst of inmigration for Bread for the World