42% of Farm Laborers Worked Illegally in 1995-97, Study Says

Bolstering growers’ complaints that it is tough to find an adequate supply of documented workers, a study released Tuesday by UC Berkeley said the proportion of California farm laborers working illegally has soared in the 1990s.

From 9% in 1990-91, the figure leaped to 42% in 1995-97, according to an analysis of California data from Labor Department surveys.

The results demonstrate that Immigration and Naturalization Service rules have not been up to the task of controlling illegal immigration, said Howard Rosenberg, a UC Berkeley cooperative extension specialist and lead author of the report, titled “Who Works on California Farms?”

Rosenberg noted that this report was merely an effort to get “a snapshot” of today’s seasonal agricultural work force and was not intended to judge whether the situation posed a problem or to propose solutions.

The report revealed that the average age of seasonal farm workers in California is 33. About 61% of the workers are married, 56% have children, and 18% are women. Typically, they are employed almost half the year in seasonal farm work, and about three-fourths earned less than $10,000 annually.

Ninety-one percent of the workers are natives of Mexico, and the number of workers who have lived in this country less than three years has more than doubled since 1990, to 26% from 12%.

That, Rosenberg said, indicates how time has eroded the effects of a 1980s federal immigrant amnesty program, the Special Agricultural Worker Program, which was intended to provide legal resident status to about 1 million farm workers in the U.S. The program did reduce the number of undocumented workers early this decade. It didn’t fill the gap long term, however, because many of those workers moved on to better-paying jobs in other industries, Rosenberg said.

Undocumented newcomers continue to find jobs on California farms and ranches because they have been able to secure driver’s licenses and Social Security cards on the black market. Growers have complained that if they challenge workers’ documents they can run afoul of immigration rules that prohibit harassing workers.

Last summer, unions blocked a federal guest worker bill that was designed to ease what growers contend is a shortage of authorized workers. Growers said they were at risk of sudden shortages caused by targeted INS enforcement.

Rosenberg said some California growers have estimated the percentage of illegal workers to be as high as 70% to 80%.

Rosenberg drew on voluminous data from the Labor Department’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, which each year polls more than 2,000 randomly selected crop workers nationwide, about 29% of them in California.