Third, new job categories in the service sector have emerged in recent decades. Fast-food service, newspaper delivery, and landscaping are three areas with exploding demand for low-paid, contingent workers. Changing lifestyles including increased pressure on the middle class, rising expectations for consumption, and the entry of women into the workforce have created whole new sectors of the economy that have relied heavily on undocumented workers.
Steve Striffler notes, “Latinos are becoming virtually synonymous with food preparation and cleanup in our nation’s restaurants. To find a meal that has not at some point passed through the hands of Mexican immigrants is a difficult task.”18 Chicken, for example, boomed in popularity in the 1980s and ’90s, as it was transformed from a low-profit farm product that was generally sold whole or in parts to a highly processed—and highly profitable—manufactured commodity in forms like nuggets and fingers. And who does the processing in the new plants that have created our contemporary incarnation of chicken? In large numbers, and across the country, it is Mexican and Central American workers, many of them undocumented.
AGRICULTURE
As fruit and vegetable agriculture spread in California at the end of the nineteenth century, farmers sought a labor force that would be as tractable and exploitable as African slaves had been in the South, or even better, one that would be there only when needed for the labor-intensive seasons. “A California farm spokesman in 1872 observed that hiring seasonal Chinese workers who housed themselves and then ‘melted away’ when they were not needed made them ‘more efficient . . . than negro labor in the South [because] it [Chinese labor] is only employed when actually needed, and is, therefore, less expensive’ than slavery.”19
When the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 eliminated that option a decade later, agriculturalists turned to Mexicans. Seasonal farm labor increased rapidly over the course of the century as farming centralized. Worker mobility, writes Don Mitchell, was built into the system. He quotes Harry Drobish of the California Relief Administration, who wrote in 1935 that “the nature of crop plantings . . . compels labor mobility.”20 However, as Mitchell argues, Drobish attributed to “nature” what was actually a result of economic structure. Human decisions and policies, not nature, underlay the development of California’s agricultural system.21
A report to Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor in 1951 noted the shift away from small farms relying on family labor and the rapid growth of large farms making heavy use of migrant labor. Earlier, most farms used no hired workers or one or two permanent employees. By 1951, more and more were using large numbers of seasonal workers.22
American workers didn’t want these jobs. As the commission reported, “The American farm worker is still legally and morally responsible to feed his family every day.” With seasonal work, “it is almost impossible for him to meet American standards of life.”23 But employers had little use for permanent workers: “When the work is done, neither the farmer nor the community wants the wetback around.”24 Furthermore, agricultural employers preferred a kind of “feudal” relationship that they could only enjoy with migrants. They “do not care for workers who may voice complaints in regard to working conditions, housing, or sanitary facilities. They want only those people who will go quietly about their work and make no comments or objections. They want the Mexican worker who has just come across the border and is strange to our language and ways of life. They find that the Mexican who has been in this country for some time and become acquainted with our free customs is no longer suited to the economic and social status of a stoop laborer.”25
The Bracero Program, starting in 1942, was a building block in the establishment of the California agricultural system based on a highly exploitative labor process.26 Migratory labor was “the essential labor force” at the basis of this system.27 And not only migratory labor: frequently and cyclically, these migratory workers were undocumented. As geographer Don Mitchell shows, the existence of a large pool of “officially invisible” undocumented workers was crucial to the functioning of the Bracero Program and tacitly acknowledged by those administering and benefiting from it. Farmers could request Bracero contract workers even as they enjoyed a surplus of available (but officially invisible) undocumented migrants. This permanently renewed oversupply of labor “was not a privilege big California growers wanted to relinquish lightly.”28
As Mitchell illustrates, there was never a labor shortage in California agriculture. California agribusiness depended on workers who were cheap, temporary, and exploitable, and on government policies that ensured their continued access to these workers both as braceros and as undocumented migrants.29
“For growers, a productive, living landscape required that workers become more and more mere vessels of labor power . . . [and] less and less living, breathing people.”30 The Bracero system contributed simultaneously to “the destabilization of working people” and “the stabilization of the profitable landscape: it saved the crops—precisely because it destroyed lives.”31 As geographer Richard Walker points out, the enormous prosperity of California’s agriculture should—or at least could—have improved the lives of workers as well. It didn’t. “Low-wage labor has been systematically built into labor relations and the reproduction of capital. . . . The low wages of farm labor are an important factor in the continuing profitability of California agribusiness.”32
With the end of the Bracero Program in 1964, undocumented workers came to the fore as the migrant agricultural labor force. The program was phased out gradually between 1965 and 1967, so that it ended completely just as the limit of 120,000 immigrants per year from the Western Hemisphere—the first numerical limit ever—went into effect.33 As described in chapter 2, by 1965 the program was no longer necessary because the flow of undocumented workers was large enough to fulfill the needs of agribusiness.34 Seasonal migration continued unabated, except that now even former braceros migrated without documents.35 Some scholars termed the post-1965 system of undocumented migration a “de facto guest-worker program.”36
The special provisions for farm workers in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 highlighted the special need for undocumented—“illegal”—workers in agriculture. To apply for legal status, most migrants (mostly Mexicans) had to prove that they had been in the United States continuously since 1982. This provision rested on the same rationale that previous legalizations (of Europeans) had relied upon: that length of residence could outweigh technical irregularities in means of arrival and justify legalization.
However, the provisions for agricultural workers were different: instead of requiring the four years of continuous residence, the act offered legal status to migrant farm workers who had simply been employed in agriculture for at least ninety days during the 1985–1986 season. (Or, as shown earlier, who could provide false documents stating that this was the case.) The law made this exception precisely because it acknowledged agriculture’s reliance on these migrant workers.
The employer sanctions provision of IRCA contributed to a shift away from direct employment and to the use of Farm Labor Contractors. The use of FLCs increased from about one-third of farms hiring migrant labor in the mid-1980s to over half in the early 1990s.37 This system allowed employers to evade legal responsibility for the workers they relied on. As Philip Martin concludes, “FLCs are practically a proxy for the employment of undocumented workers and egregious or subtle violations of labor laws.”38 He noted that while the US manufacturing sector shrank in the 1980s, the agricultural sector expanded, as farmers continued to be confident of their ability to rely on low-wage labor. Immigrant workers earning below poverty-level wages subsidized the expansion of an agribusiness model that increased poverty at the same time that it increased profits.39
The IRCA contributed to the growth of the FLC system in three ways. Employer sanctions encouraged farmers to seek third parties to take the risks of employing laborers. Many former migrant workers, now legalized under the SAW Program, took a
dvantage of their new status to become FLCs. Finally, the rise of the FLC system coincided with the shift from Mexico’s traditional sending regions to new, indigenous areas in southern Mexico and Guatemala, in which the FLCs served as important recruiters and intermediaries.40
A temporary labor force that will simply move on when the work dwindles at the end of the season may seem ideal from an employer’s perspective. For the workers, though, such a life is characterized by poverty, uncertainty, and long periods of unemployment. The Economist in 2010 noted the parallels between today’s Mexican migrants and the desperate “Okies” who migrated during the Depression in their struggle to find work, comparing a contemporary Mexican migrant family, the Vegas, to the Joads in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath:
Often they take the same roads on which the “Okies” travelled en masse in the 1930s as they fled the depressed dust bowl of Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas to seek a living in California. These Okies are forever etched into America’s psyche. . . . Joads then and Vegas now are pushed by the same need, pulled by the same promise. Now as then, there is no clearing house for jobs in the fields, so the migrants follow tips and rumours. Often, like the Joads, they end up in the right places at the wrong times. Felix Vega and three of his group, including his wife, were dropped off in Oxnard, famous for its strawberries. But they arrived out of season, so they slept on the streets, then in a doghouse, then in somebody’s car. For two months they did not bathe and barely ate. Finally, they found jobs picking strawberries and made their first money in America.41
In the summer of 2010, the United Farm Workers decided to confront the myth that “they [immigrants] take our jobs” directly. The union organized a campaign called “Take Our Jobs,” inviting citizens and green-card holders to apply for agricultural work. The campaign got an extra publicity boost when comedian Stephen Colbert took up the challenge and then testified to Congress about the experience. Three months into the campaign, the union announced that its website, takeourjobs.org, had been visited by 3 million people; 8,600 had expressed an interest in a job in agriculture, but only 7 had actually followed through. “These numbers demonstrate that there are more politicians and finger-pointers interested in blaming undocumented farm workers for America’s unemployment crisis than there are unemployed Americans who are willing to harvest and cultivate America’s food,” the Farm Workers concluded.42
In 2010 the US Department of Agriculture published an analysis of the probable impact of increased immigration enforcement on the US agricultural sector. The report cited the common figure that over half of the agricultural labor force consisted of undocumented Mexican workers.43 A reduction in undocumented migrant labor would lead to rising labor costs, the report concluded, and different scenarios, depending on the characteristics of the crop. Where the potential existed, mechanization would spread. Where mechanization was not an option, farmers would face market loss due to higher costs. Finally, new research in mechanization and rising consumer prices would likely result. It is notable that in no case did the report foresee improved working conditions or rising employment of domestic workers in agriculture.44
“The US fruit and vegetable industry competes in a global economy with producers from other countries who often have much lower wages. With increasing trade, competitive pressures are greater than ever. In summer 2009, the Federal minimum wage was $7.25 per hour and the minimum wage in California was $8.00 per hour, while the minimum wage in Mexico ranged from $3.49 to $4.16 per day, depending on the region,” the report explained.45 It’s no surprise that so many of the fruits and vegetables we find in the supermarket are labeled “Product of Mexico.”
Labor’s share made up 42 percent of the variable production costs for fruit and vegetable farms, and labor is the “single largest input cost” for many crops. Moreover, said the USDA report, “most [farm workers] will move on to nonagricultural employment within a decade of beginning to work in the fields.”46 Thus, agribusiness interests see a continuing supply of (undocumented) migrant workers as essential to their continued production and have lobbied heavily for a century to ensure that this supply continues to be available to them. As another USDA report put it bluntly: “The supply of farmworkers for the US produce industry depends on a constant influx of new, foreign-born labor attracted by wages above those in the workers’ countries of origin, primarily Mexico. Immigration policy helps to determine whether the produce industry’s labor force will be authorized or unauthorized.”47
The State of Kansas sought in 2012 to develop a system of its own to legalize undocumented farm workers.48 Georgia’s farmers panicked in the summer of 2011, when a new law made it a felony for an undocumented person to apply for work. The Georgia Department of Agriculture wrote that “[n]on-resident immigrant laborers, those of legal and illegal status, harvest crops, milk cows, gin cotton and maintain landscapes. Georgia farmers and agribusiness employers widely attribute the need for these workers due to the fact that local citizens do not generally possess or care to develop the specialized skills associated with agriculture and, further do not regularly demonstrate the work ethic necessary to meet the productivity requirements of the farm business.”49 A majority of Georgia farm employers hired laborers for a limited period of one to three months, another reason that citizen workers are reluctant to take these jobs.50
One season after the passage of Georgia’s new law, 26 percent of farmers answered that they had lost income because of the lack of available labor for their farms. For some specialty crops like labor-intensive fruits and vegetables (blueberries, cabbage, cantaloupe, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, squash, tobacco, and watermelon), over 50 percent were in that situation.51 Fifty-six percent said they had trouble finding qualified workers.52 “A major response theme for this question was that the work is too physically demanding and difficult for US citizens (non-immigrants). Respondents believe that only immigrant workers are willing to do the tasks needed in their operations.”53
Productivity was also an issue. “Producers expressed great concern with the quality of work from domestic workers.” According to data provided by one onion producer, “A migrant worker was twice as productive as a non-migrant worker in planting Vidalia onions.”54 As one Georgia farmer remarked, “American workers are not interested in getting dirty, bloody, sweaty, working weekends & holidays, getting to work at 4 a.m. 2 mornings a week & at 6 a.m. 5 mornings a week.”55
Experiments with criminal offenders who are out on probation—and required to work as a condition of their probation—backed up the farmer’s opinion. One crew leader “put the probationers to the test . . . assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers. ‘It’s not going to work,’ [the crew leader] said. ‘No way. If I’m going to depend on the probation people, I’m never going to get the crops up.’”56
As Philip Martin explains, most workers won’t spend more than ten years working in agriculture. “As it is currently structured, fruit and vegetable agriculture requires a constant inflow of workers from abroad who are willing to accept seasonal farm jobs.”57 Farm labor is so marginal, strenuous, and low paid, that if workers achieve legal status, they quickly move into other sectors. Thus “farmers and their political allies . . . oppose simply legalizing unauthorized workers, which would enable them to get nonfarm jobs. Instead, farmers agree to legalization only in exchange for large guest-worker programs that give employers considerable control of foreign workers.”58
Sixty years ago the folk singer–songwriter Woody Guthrie asked somewhat rhetorically, “Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?” In the ensuing half-century, the United States has only deepened its “modern agricultural dilemma.” It has devised a vast and multifaceted agricultural system that depends upon desperate workers for its survival. True, for many Mexicans—from the Bracero days to the present—low-wage, te
mporary, migrant labor in the United States offers a viable or even hopeful alternative to poverty at home. But this merely means that the US agricultural system depends upon the existence of a lot of extremely poor people in Mexico.59
While modern large-scale agricultural systems produce vast amounts of food, they have also created large-scale problems: “high capital costs; environmental deterioration of farmland through erosion, salinization, compaction, and chemical overload; pesticide and chemical fertilizer pollution of lakes, streams, and groundwater; unhealthy working conditions for farm workers, farmers, and farm families; dependence on an extremely narrow and destabilizing genetic base in major crops; dependence on nonrenewable mineral and energy resources; the destruction of rural communities; and the increasingly concentrated control of the nation’s food supply.”60 Other critiques examine the consumption side: the increasing reliance on overprocessed, high-sugar, and fatty foods, fast food and junk food, and the lifestyle diseases like heart disease and diabetes that have resulted.61
As we in the United States confront the problems in our agricultural and food production system, the problem of labor scarcity and continued reliance on impoverished, undocumented workers has to be central to the discussion. Given the way the agricultural system currently works, farm labor is so precarious and so harsh that only displaced migrants, the majority of them rendered illegal by US laws, are willing and able to carry it out. Paradoxically, most of these migrants were in fact displaced from centuries-old systems of subsistence agriculture in Mexico by precisely the same agricultural modernization that now demands their labor elsewhere. A truly comprehensive approach to immigration reform would look at these interlocking economic and structural systems, not merely make more narrow changes in immigration law.
We must recognize the basic irrationality, immorality, and unsustainability of the food production system. Farmers overwhelmingly oppose the harsh state-level immigration laws that make it more difficult for them to find the seasonal workers they need. In the short term, simply making it legal for immigrants to work in agriculture would address the needs of both farmers and immigrant farm workers who are undocumented. The larger problems await a longer-term and more profound reform of the global agricultural system. We can begin by acknowledging that our access to relatively cheap and abundant food in the United States exists because of the hard labor of poor Mexicans, in their country and in our own.
Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) Page 13