Restore Benefits to Legal Immigrants or Face a Poverty Dead-End

The long-awaited final report of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform released two weeks ago calls for stepped-up efforts to draw immigrants into our cultural mainstream. Five years in the making, the bipartisan report underscores the need to teach immigrant adults and children English and to acquaint newcomers with the nation’s civic values.

But one important immigrant subpopulation has needs that go beyond these integration proposals. The roughly 900,000 foreign-born laborers, mainly Mexican, who work sometime during the year in California agriculture live in a world apart from most Americans and even from the kind of familiar rural poverty captured in lingering images of the Dust Bowl or postwar Appalachia.

This new immigrant population is rapidly changing the face of California’s--and the nation’s--agricultural regions. Mexican and other Latin American migrants who used to commute seasonally between the U.S. and their homelands are now settling in rural California, in some cases to avoid the higher risks of coming back across a tightened border. These new settlement patterns have concentrated poverty in selected communities within an increasingly prosperous farm economy.

In 1990, seven of the 10 U.S. cities with the highest share of immigrants living in pockets of intense poverty were in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where export-driven agriculture sales exceeded those of any other state. Unlike the rural poverty of the postwar South or the Midwest of the 1930s and ‘40s, today’s rural poverty grows along with today’s prosperity.

The hallmarks of this new rural poverty are low wages, poor working conditions and a permanent labor surplus.

We have been studying the situation in seven California towns: Parlier, Madera, Farmersville, McFarland, Shandon, Guadalupe and Watsonville. In most of them, the population grew rapidly in the 1970s and ‘80s, wages and incomes stagnated and the use of public assistance remained stubbornly high through the mid-’90s.

Behind the persistent poverty and insecurity that these conditions inevitably breed is a deep structural economic problem: a disconnect between a flourishing agricultural industry and the overburdened towns and cities that provide the services needed by growing migrant populations. These communities are ill-equipped to assimilate sudden waves of newcomers, since their tax bases are limited and since the working poor have little to spend and initially pay little in taxes.

Ironically, the current mix of immigrant control and immigrant integration policies could intensify this new rural poverty. As long as immigration laws are haphazardly enforced in the workplace, the tightening of border enforcement could trap in rural towns undocumented workers who might otherwise go home (40% of the farm worker population is illegal). And new laws passed last year to make it harder for illegal entrants into the United States to get “green cards” and for some legal immigrants to qualify for safety-net programs could lock migrant workers and their families into an easy-to-exploit underclass.

Our research in California rules out simple solutions to this situation, but it does point to a combination of responses that could make a difference:

* Restore food stamp and other benefits to all legal immigrants, a step recommended by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.

* Continue the health, Head Start, education and job training programs aimed at migrant and seasonal farm workers and target these programs to the most transient workers.

* Give rural school districts the impact aid they need to teach migrant students.

* Supplement border enforcement with employer sanctions while at the same time minimizing regulatory hassles and decreasing discrimination against people who look foreign.

This package of initiatives would not be cheap or politically easy. Restoring benefits to legal immigrants would cost the federal government more than $10 billion--one-quarter of the expected savings of welfare reform. The administrative costs of making these programs available would be high, and any aid package to schools serving immigrants would certainly be challenged by advocates for other student populations with special needs.

But what is the alternative? The temporary guest-worker programs proposed by some in the agricultural industry would do little to reduce labor surpluses, would create a new class of residents without rights and would be likely to end up serving as a new magnet for illegal migration; they also would freeze into place farming techniques that rely on short-term, itinerant workers.

To do nothing is to say yes to a kind of permanent dead-end poverty that doesn’t square with any historical notion of immigrant integration.