Don’t Open the Door to Guest Workers : Agribusiness: It’s the growers’ greed, not need, that is behind the proposed program.
The federal government is finally trying to regain control of our borders, but no sooner has the effort gotten serious than the cry has gone up from California agribusiness that if it can no longer rely on a steady stream of undocumented farm workers, the crops will rot in the fields.
Their claim is false. The U.S Commission on Immigration Reform chaired by Barbara Jordan had it exactly right. It rejected the century-old claim of agribusiness that it must bring in temporary foreign farm workers to harvest our fruits and vegetables, and instead concluded that an agricultural guest worker program “is not in the national interest and . . . would be a grievous mistake.”
The suggestion that there is an impending shortage of U.S. farm workers is a falsehood foisted on the public and policy-makers by agricultural employers who prefer non-U.S. farm workers. Guest workers, no less than the undocumented, are virtually powerless to prevent inhumane and illegal wages and working conditions because they are fired and deported if they challenge those abuses. Let’s examine the facts. Numerous studies of the agricultural labor market since enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 have found, without exception, a surplus of agricultural labor, evidenced by massive unemployment and underemployment among farm workers. Farm workers average only 31 weeks of work annually and earn only $6,000 per year. Any effort to increase the labor supply would further impoverish American farm workers and reduce the labor costs of agricultural employers, which is the growers’ precise purpose in seeking a new guest worker program.
Growers insist that the removal of undocumented workers from agriculture, through tougher enforcement of the law barring the employment of persons illegally in the United States, will create shortages. If true, this is an open acknowledgment of what we all know: Agribusiness has violated immigration laws by employing thousands of undocumented workers. This, despite the special treatment it got in 1986 when Congress created a special seasonal agricultural worker program.
Significantly, a Department of Labor survey found that most of the seasonal workers in the 1986 program have stayed in agriculture. Some have left because of terrible wages and working conditions, but the way to rectify that situation is for the growers to compete for their labor by improving wages and conditions.
And don’t forget that Congress is about to pass major welfare reform legislation, placing a time limit on the receipt of cash assistance, after which heads of households will be required to work. As a result, many of those on the welfare rolls will be entering the work force. It strains credulity to suggest that at the same time Congress insists that thousands of unskilled Americans leave the public dole, the same Congress should also sanction the importation of thousands of unskilled workers for jobs Americans could fill.
So what we have is an atrocious proposed solution--a guest worker program (reviving the scandalous old bracero program under a new name)--to a non-problem: the alleged impending shortage of farm workers.
Underlying the argument for an agricultural guest worker program is the notion that farm workers must be forever doomed to poverty and inequity. Why? Where is it written, in this free market economy, that agricultural employers need not improve wages and working conditions to attract and retain an adequate supply of labor?
Farm workers should be able to look forward to the day when growers feel sufficient pressure from the laws of supply and demand to offer better pay, longer employment and meaningful benefits. Farm workers have suffered enough. Let’s not make it worse with a guest worker program.
