New Wave of Cheap Labor Seen : Alien Farm Workers Fear Immigration Law Change

Salvador, Maria and their children have picked chilies, tomatoes and other vegetables here and in the Salinas Valley for 10 years, stooping in the fertile fields and keeping a nervous lookout for immigration agents who could swoop down at any time and ship them back to Mexico.

On a typical day recently, Salvador and Maria brought home $40--barely more than $2 an hour and far below the $3.35 minimum wage--for eight hours of harvesting chilies. When not in school, their children--including an 8-year-old son who is four years from the legal working age--work beside them in the fields despite laws against child labor.

But Salvador and Maria, both in the country illegally, are in no position to invoke the niceties of American labor laws.

Under a set of sweeping changes in immigration laws that passed the Senate last month and are under consideration in the House, people like Salvador and Maria might gain a chance to emerge from the underworld of the undocumented and demand better working conditions.

Instead of applauding, however, they fear the changes could usher in a new wave of cheap and legal foreign labor to snatch jobs from farm workers already here--both lawfully and otherwise.

“There is hardly enough work for us in the fields now because there are too many workers,” said Salvador, who did not want to give his last name because of his illegal status. Maria agreed: “If the braceros come, there will be even less work for us.”

Agricultural interests are pressing Congress to vastly expand their power to legally import “guest workers,” primarily from Mexico, for temporary periods to harvest perishable fruits and vegetables. That demand has elevated the guest-worker issue to a pivotal role this year in Congress’ long-running effort to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.

So heated has the battle over the guest-worker provision become that it threatens to affect the outcome on the entire bill.

The Senate-passed legislation, while granting amnesty to many illegal aliens like Salvador and Maria who have been in the country for several years, would also make it illegal for the first time for employers to hire undocumented workers.

Fear Labor Shortage

Growers and their congressional allies, chief among them Republican Sen. Pete Wilson of California, contend that such sanctions would quickly dry up today’s labor glut and create a shortage that--in the absence of guest workers--would leave weather-sensitive crops rotting on the ground and cripple the $23-billion perishable produce industry.

Critics of the guest-worker program, on the other hand, contend that the clamor for it is rooted more in greed than need. Latino groups and labor unions say unemployment in most of the nation’s produce-growing regions is double the national average and that the jobless rate in California’s agricultural heartland is even worse. Importing new workers, they argue, would merely keep those already here from demanding better wages and working conditions.

Dolores Huerta, a top official of the United Farm Workers’ Union, envisions a “slave system for labor,” supported by a “giant police system to enforce it that will affect only one group (Latinos).”

“Nonsense,” counters Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Long Beach), a leading House advocate of a guest-worker program. “They talk as if we don’t already have a large-scale presence of foreign farm labor.”

Four in Five Could Stay

Neither side has conclusive facts at its disposal, but the only study available, done in 1983 by the State Employment Development Department and the University of California at Davis, indicates that four seasonal farm workers in five could prove legal immigration status and remain in the work force.

And in a further blow to the growers’ argument that immigration reform could dry up their supply of labor, the study added: “Seasonality and oversupply of workers . . . leaves most farm worker families below the poverty level.” Both sides’ bleak visions of the future grow largely from the bitter experience of Western agriculture’s traditional reliance on foreign workers to do the back-breaking work of harvesting produce.

California farmers have employed foreign workers ever since the golden spike was driven in 1869, inaugurating transcontinental rail traffic and opening Eastern markets to fruits and vegetables grown in the San Joaquin Valley. The first wave of foreign hands was mostly Chinese, but when they struck for higher wages, growers brought in Japanese, Filipinos and even Arabs. And always, there were the Mexicans.

‘Okies’ Join Military

During the Depression years of the 1930s, Western growers turned to impoverished domestic workers driven off their lands in Oklahoma, Arkansas and other Southern states. But when the “Okies” left the fields to join the military in World War II, Washington arranged with the Mexican government to send replacements.

It was the start of the controversial program nicknamed bracero , which grew from a few thousand participants in the early years to about 400,000 annually by the time it was terminated by the United States in 1964 amid widespread complaints that employers were exploiting their foreign farmhands and forcing them to live in squalor.

The bracero experience casts a long shadow over today’s guest worker debate. Labor Department studies showed that even though program rules set the prevailing wage for braceros, their large-scale presence depressed wages for all seasonal farm workers, both domestic and foreign. And many of those brought in legally on a temporary basis stayed on illegally when the work was done, or slipped back across the border after they were sent home. Fewer than 5 million braceros entered the United States during the life of the program, but 5.6 million illegal aliens were detained by immigration agents over the same time span.

Shortage Predicted

When the bracero program ended, Western farmers predicted a shortage of domestic farm labor and said their efforts to lure local residents into the fields at harvest time had fallen flat. Merced County tomato growers claimed they would be forced to halve the acreage they planted. A spokesman for fruit growers said the industry would move to Mexico because of lower labor costs there.

Despite the ominous predictions, the industry thrived, though it never kicked its dependence on foreign labor. Large numbers of undocumented workers continued to supplement the migrant work force.

Today, as in the 1960s, many growers insist that anything that would disrupt their access to foreign workers--such as sanctions imposing hefty fines on the growers for hiring them--would have serious repercussions for agriculture in the West, where perishable crops ripen with the whims of the weather and spoil if not picked quickly.

“There is a functioning network in place that provides employees where and when they are needed--which is the bottom line in perishable agriculture,” Michael V. Durando, president of the California Grape & Tree Fruit League, recently told a House Judiciary subcommittee. “. . . Our members’ worst fear is that, with an inflexible system, we could end up with an emergency and no way to respond. In that case, a farmer would have one of two choices: break the law (and hire illegal aliens) or lose his crop.”

‘Abundance of Labor’

Growers are not unanimous in that view. Milas Russell, president of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Assn., said that there is “an abundance of labor” in the valley, whose proximity to Mexico enables growers to reach across the border for thousands of aliens who hold “green cards” entitling them to work in the United States. Similarly, Richard Thornton, former executive director of the Growers & Shippers Assn. in the Salinas Valley, said high wages paid in California guarantee an adequate labor supply.

But this view is a minority. The dominant growers succeeded in attaching to the Senate-passed immigration reform bill an amendment sponsored by Sen. Wilson to let them import up to 350,000 guest workers nationally at a time for at least the next three years if Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III certifies that domestic labor supplies were inadequate to harvest perishable crops.

The Reagan Administration for the first time has endorsed the guest-worker concept, sketching out a program that would open the borders to foreign workers for years or even decades. A key figure in reaching that decision was John R. Norton, a former president of the Western Growers Assn. who became deputy secretary of agriculture earlier this year.

Cites Uncertainties

Norton, whose firm, J.R. Norton Co., has been charged by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board with more than 100 farm labor law violations since 1975, insists that farmers need a standby guest-worker program because of the uncertainties raised by immigration reform.

“It is an insurance policy,” he said in an interview. “We can’t say to what extent the (program) would have to be used because . . . you don’t know exactly the consequences of the law. We’re not asking for labor if it’s not needed.”

Farm labor advocates think that farmers would make plenty of use of the program, especially with a sympathetic attorney general likely to let the program go ahead.

“One of the goals of immigration reform is to stop displacement of American workers from their jobs, and here in the immigration bill we’re totally undercutting the intent of that reform with proposals to bring in more foreigners,” argued Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), a one-time farm union lawyer.

‘More Malleable’

“Guest workers are less contentious and more malleable because they know they want to come back next year,” Berman said. “Foreign workers are less likely to unionize and less likely to file grievances or lawsuits.”

The prospect of competition from guest workers for scarce jobs has raised alarms throughout the migrant community in California. Interviews with two dozen workers in five key agricultural counties found that virtually all of them, those in the country both legally and illegally, complained that wages were already depressed, labor contractors were exploiting them and laws governing housing, sanitation and other working conditions were rarely enforced.

“For the first time in 20 years, lettuce cutters are begging for work,” said Mario Bustamente, 37, a green-card holder and former United Farm Workers official.

‘What Would We Do?’

An illegal alien who declined to give his name acknowledged that a new guest-worker program “may be of help to those people from Mexico. But what would we do?”

The man, a father of five who looks like a short, stout version of Anthony Quinn, settled in the Salinas Valley in 1981 after shuttling back and forth to Tijuana for a dozen years. That means he has lived in the United States continuously long enough to qualify for legal status under the immigration reform bill before the House Judiciary Committee--although not long enough under the Senate-passed bill.

The family is living in a ramshackle house without water or toilet in a labor camp provided by the grower. On one recent day, the man and his wife earned $30 for eight hours of chili picking--less than $2 an hour.

“There isn’t enough work now,” he complained. “And there would be much less work for us. . . . With the coming of the bracero, I cannot see much future for my children.”

Bob Secter reported from Washington and Ronald B. Taylor reported from California.