CIVIL
RIGHTS - NON-CITIZENS
IMMIGRATION ISSUES IN THE UNITED STATES
Part
I-A - AFTERWORD:
Illegal Immigration in the California Strawberry Industry
7/19/04
In Part
I, I covered the topic of illegal immigration, focusing in
particular on the fiscal impact and impact on crime of (illegal)
immigration (among other things).
In Part
II I wrote a response to Samuel Huntington's essay in Foreign
Policy magazine titled "The
Hispanic Challenge", challenging many of his claims regarding
Mexican immigration.
This Part (I-A), is an
Afterword to Part I. In July 2004, I came across and read a part of
Eric Schlosser's book "Reefer
Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black
Market". In particular, I read his chapter titled "In
the Strawberry Fields", which covers the use of illegal
immigrants in California's strawberry (and agriculture) industry. What
I found interesting was how many of the issues I covered in Part I
came to life in this real-world example from Schlosser. So,
in this afterword, I am reproducing relevant extracts from the above
chapter of his book (in brown font)
- with some added comments (bold text is eRiposte
emphasis).
I will use this opportunity
to reiterate what I said in Parts I and II - namely, that, the illegal
immigration problem is being made worse by considering it mostly a
"supply" (of illegals) problem, rather than a
"demand" (for illegals) problem. Schlosser's brief history
of agricultural workers in California proves this point. Using
traditional guest-worker type solutions for this problem will only
exacerbate it by allowing employers to use a class of lower-paid
workers who get minimal or zero benefits, while placing the burden of
meeting their health/education needs in the hands of States. I said
this earlier in Part I - where I also summarized some of my proposed
solutions to this problem.
A. Illegal
immigrants subsidize an important sector of California's economy, but
drive down wages for almost all farmworkers
Agriculture
is still California's largest industry. Since the late 1940s
California has led America in agricultural output; it now produces
more than half the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the
United States. Hundreds of commodities, from the mundane to the
exotic, are grown in California, primarily in the Central Valley, an
area that contains some of the world's most productive farmland.
...
Meanwhile, the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of
California's farm economy - the cultivation of high-value specialty
crops - has also become the one most dependent on the availability
of cheap labor. Nearly every fruit and vegetable found in the diet
of health-conscious, often high-minded consumers is still picked by
hand...As the demand for these foods has risen, so has the number of
workers necessary to harvest them. Of the migrants in
California today, anywhere from 30 to 60 percent, depending on the
crop, are illegal immigrants. Their willingness to work long hours
for low wages has enabled California to sustain its agricultural
production, despite the loss since 1964 of more than nine million
acres of farmland. Fruit and vegetable growers now rely on a
thriving black market in labor - and without it even more farms
would disappear. Illegal immigrants, widely reviled and often
depicted as welfare cheats, are in effect subsidizing the most
important sector of the California economy.
...
Not only are there far more migrants today, but they are being paid
far less. The hourly wages of some California farmworkers,
adjusted for inflation, have dropped more than 50 percent since
1980. Migrants are among the poorest workers in the United States.
The average migrant is a twenty-nine-year-old male, born in Mexico,
who earns less than $7500 a year for twenty-five weeks of farmwork.
According to one estimate, his life expectancy is forty-nine years.
B. The inherent
risks in strawberry cultivation are hedged by the growers using
ultra-cheap laborers (illegal immigrants) who are unlikely to complain
about their abysmal pay, lack of benefits or unpleasant working
conditions
The
strawberry has become the focus of a California industry whose
annual sales are about $840 million. American farmers now receive
more money for fresh strawberries each year than for any other fresh
fruit grown in the United States, except apples. And strawberry
pickers are not only the poorest migrants but also the ones most
likely to be illegal immigrants.
...
As in most fruit and vegetable production, the steady profits are
usually earned by the middlemen - processors, cooling houses,
supermarket chains - and not by the growers. In the strawberry
industry, a grower's annual losses can be huge...The only cost over
which a grower has any real control is the cost of labor.
...
Since labor costs constitute between 50 and 70 percent of the
total cost in strawberry production, cutting labor costs can
sometimes mean the difference between a profit and a loss, or
between a bad year and a disastrous one.
...
The growers are often obligated to pay unemployment taxes and
workers' compensation premiums for each of their employees, in
addition to Social Security and Medicare taxes. Paying an
"invisible worker" in cash lowers the cost of that worker
by at least 20 percent. Ignoring California's rules about overtime
effectively cuts those wages by 50 percent. And failing to pay any
wages brings the greatest savings of all. The vast number of illegal
immigrants in the migrant work force is an invitation to break the
law. They are unlikely to approach authorities about a violation of
the labor code.
Sharecropping
is the most insidious means by which growers avoid responsibility
for their workers. The sharecropper is a straw man, an
intermediary, usually a middle-aged farmworker, to whom the grower
shifts many of the legal and financial risks.
...
The sharecropper became the employer of record, responsible for
hiring strawberry pickers, paying their wages, withholding their
taxes, and checking their green cards. The grower was responsible
for all other production costs and for the overall management of the
farm. By setting up farmworkers as supposedly independent operators,
growers shielded themselves from labor and immigration laws - and
from heavy losses. The sharecropper assumed a large part of the
risk. He or she had no way of knowing whether there would be profits
in a given year or whether the grower would share them fairly.
...
Instead of paying the operating costs of a strawberry farm, these
growers - now called commission merchants - lend sharecroppers the
money for operating costs at interest rates as high as 19 percent.
Under the old arrangements if things went wrong, sharecroppers
simply would not be paid for their hard work; under the new one,
they are being saddled with thousands of dollars in debt.
...
Some of the worst violations of state and federal labor laws are
being committed by sharecroppers overwhelmed by the pressure to
repay their debts.
...
C. Over the
decades, California's lawmakers (especially Republicans) have played a
key role in gutting labor rights and tacitly encouraging the
increasing use of illegal immigrants in the agriculture industry
Illegal
immigrants from Mexico have long been a mainstay of California's
rural economy. Anglo migrant workers, the "Okies"
immortalized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, were a
historical anomaly. For almost a century, the vast majority of
California's migrant workers have been Mexican immigrants, legal and
illegal.
...
During the 1970s, the United Farm Workers (UFW) achieved great
success organizing migrants in the California grape and lettuce
industries. The influence of the UFW extended far beyond these crops;
simply the threat of unionization persuaded many growers to raise
wages, offer benefits, and improve working conditions. At about the
same time, California adopted some of the most pro-union legislation
in the country, guaranteeing farmworkers the right to collective
bargaining, a minimum wage, and unemployment compensation. As labor
costs increased, mechanization became a top priority for California
growers. But successive Republican governors, George Deukmejian
and Pete Wilson, gutted the Agricultural Labor Relations Board and
relaxed enforcement of the state's tough labor laws. Union worsens
were fired; illegal immigrants replaced them; and growers avoided
prosecution for workplace violations by hiding behind legal fiction
that labor contractors and sharecroppers were the actual employers
of migrants. Hard-won benefits such as sick leave, vacation pay,
family housing, and health insurance were eliminated. The living and
working conditions of migrants steadily declined.
...
Harvest work in the strawberry fields, like most seasonal farmwork
in California, is considered "at will." There is no
contract, no seniority, no obligation beyond the day-to-day. A
grower hires and fires workers as necessary, without need for
explanation. It makes no difference whether the migrant has been an
employee for six days or for six years. The terms of employment are
laid down on a daily basis.
...
This system did not arise because growers are innately mean and
heartless. Harvests are unpredictable from beginning to end.
...
D. Illegal
immigrants are not just underpaid; they are very likely to suffer
work-related disabilities which are not covered by insurance. They
often do not have a place to live. Since they usually do not get any
benefits, their care increasingly has become the responsibility of the
state government.
The
strawberry has long been known to migrants as la fruta del diablo
- the fruit of the devil. Picking strawberries is some of the
lowest-paid, most difficult, and therefore least desirable farmwork
in California. Strawberries are fragile and bruise easily. They must
be picked with great care, especially the berries that will be sold
fresh at the market.
...
You must bend at the waist to pick the fruit, which explains why
the job is so difficult. Bending over that way for an hour can cause
a stiff back; doing so for ten to twelve hours a day, weeks at a
time, can cause excruciating pain and lifelong disabilities.
Most strawberry pickers suffer back pain.
...
Another constant worry is finding a place to sleep.
...
The determination to preserve agricultural land has not, however,
extended to providing shelter for agricultural worriers. Since 1980
the acreage around Watsonville and Salinas devoted to strawberries
has more than doubled and the tonnage of strawberries produced there
has nearly quadrupled. But the huge influx of migrant workers
required to pick these berries has been forced to compete for a supply
of low-income housing that been inadequate for decades.
...
Migrants routinely pay $100 to $200 a month to sleep in a garage
with anywhere from four to ten other people. A survey of garages in
Soledad found 1,500 inhabitants - a number roughly equal to
one-eighth of the town's official population. At the peak of the
harvest the housing shortage becomes acute. Migrants at the labor
camps sometimes pay to sleep in parked cars. The newest migrant
workers, who lack family in the area and haven't yet learned she
ropes, often sleep outdoors in the wooded sections of Prunedale,
trespassing, moving to a different hiding place each night. On
hillsides above the Salinas Valley, hundreds of strawberry pickers
have been found living in caves.
...
By relying on poor migrants from Mexico, California growers
established a wage structure that discouraged American citizens from
seeking farmwork. The wages offered at harvest were too low to
sustain a family in the United States, but they were up to ten times
as high as any wages Mexican peasants could earn in their native
villages. A system evolved in which the cheap labor of Mexican
migrants subsidized California agriculture, while remittances from
that farmwork preserved rural communities in Mexico that otherwise
might have collapsed. For decades the men of Mexican villages have
traveled north to the fields of California, leaving behind women,
children, and the elderly to look after their small farms. Migrant
work in California has long absorbed Mexican surplus labor,
while Mexico has in effect paid for the education, health care and
retirement of California's farmworkers.
Whenever
migrants decided to settle in California, however, they interrupted
the smooth workings of this system, by imposing higher costs on the
state - especially if they married and raised children. That is why
the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) used to round up
and deport illegal immigrants in California immediately after the
harvest.
...
E. In spite of a
Presidential Commission's recommendation that employers using illegal
immigrants be penalized heavily, Congress and past Presidents have largely
ignored this part of the Commission's recommendations, and through
such inaction (and other actions) set the stage for the use of illegal
immigrants to flourish
In 1951
THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION on Migratory Labor condemned the
abysmal living conditions of illegal immigrants employed as
migrant workers in the United States. At the time, workers were
found living in orchards and irrigation ditches. They lived in
constant fear of apprehension, like fugitives, and were routinely
exploited by their employers, who could maintain unsafe working
conditions, cut wages, or abruptly dismiss them with little worry of
reprisal. In many cases, the life of these migrants was,
according to the commission, "virtually peonage." The
commission estimated that 40 percent of the migrants in the United
States - at least 400,000 people - were illegal immigrants. Their
presence in such large numbers depressed wages for all farmworkers;
that fact was "unquestionable." Indeed, illegal
immigrants had begun to displace native-born workers not only in
agriculture but in nonfarm occupations such as construction. The
commission argued that the only way to stop the flow of illegals was
to impose harsh punishments on growers who employed and exploited
them. It suggested fines, imprisonments and a strict prohibition on
the shipment in interstate commerce of any goods harvested by
illegal immigrants. "We depend on misfortune to build up our
force of migratory workers,'' the commission concluded, "and
when the supply is low because there is not enough misfortune at
home, we rely on misfortune abroad to replenish the supply."
Congress
ignored the commission's recommendations, and for the next two
decades it was a crime to be an illegal immigrant in the United
States but not a crime to employ one. In 1986, Congress passed the
Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which demanded broad
sanctions against the employers of illegal immigrants. But these
sanctions have rarely been applied. There are about a minion private
employers in California - and about 200 federal inspectors to
investigate workplace violations of the immigration code. Moreover,
the federal penalties for employing an illegal immigrant are rather
mild. A first offense may result in a fine of $250, a third offense,
in a fine of $3,000.
Instead
of stemming illegal immigration, IRCA actually encouraged it. In
response to growers' fears that the new sanctions on employers would
create a shortage of farmworkers, Congress included in the bill a
special amnesty for illegal immigrants who could prove they had done
farm work in the previous year. It did not demand much proof.
Backed by Congressman Leon Panetta and Senator Pete Wilson, both
from California, the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program was
expected to grant legal status to 350,000 illegal immigrants.
Instead, almost 1.3 million illegal immigrants - a number roughly
equivalent at the time to one-sixth of the adult male population of
rural Mexico - applied for this amnesty, most of them using phony
documents in what has been called one of the greatest immigration
frauds in American history. More than a million illegal immigrants
were eventually granted legal status; many were soon joined
illegally by their wives and children.
...
F. Is this problem
going to be solved? Not without significant changes in the kind of
people we elect to power.
At the
moment an estimated 7 to 8 million illegal immigrants live in the
United States. About half of them are Mexican. While some advocates
of immigration reform call for another large amnesty, granting green
cards or full citizenship to millions, California growers prefer a
new guest-worker program. It would recruit migrant workers through
an international agreement and would guarantee their wages, their
living conditions - and their return to Mexico at the end of the
harvest.
...
Opponents of guest-worker programs have long based their objections
on principle. More than two decades ago, Sidney Weintraub and
Stanley R. Ross, then at the University of Texas, suggested that
"guest worker" is simply a modern euphemism for an
indentured laborer. A guest-worker program legally embraces the
concept of second-class citizenship in the United States. It creates
a group of people who have limited rights. Aside from the
philosophical objections that can be raised, many argue that such
programs just don't work. "There's nothing more
permanent," one economist said, "than temporary
workers."
...
Mexican farmworkers have long dominated the agricultural labor force
in California and the Southwest, but only recently have they begun
to migrate throughout the United States... Moreover, the same
methods long used to employ illegal immigrants in California
agriculture - the reliance on intermediaries, such as labor
contractors - are being used to employ them in the meatpacking
industry, construction work, janitorial service, and the garment
industry. The majority of illegal immigrants in California now work
in nonfarm occupations and come from regions throughout Mexico,
including urban areas such as Mexico City.
...
Despite the many policy options regarding farmworkers, the most
likely scenario is that, at the federal level, nothing will be
done...Except for a flurry of attention every few decades, the
American people have greeted the whole subject with indifference.
The nation's fresh produce is less expensive as a result - but not
much. Maintaining the current level of poverty among migrant
farmworkers saves the average American household about $50 a year.
...
The suburbanites do not like living beside Mexican farmworkers.
Instead of providing low-income housing, local authorities have
declared states of emergency, passed laws to forbid curbside hiring,
and bulldozed many of the large encampments. San Diego growers
appalled by the living conditions of their migrants have tried to
build farmworker housing near the fields - only to encounter fierce
resistance from neighboring homeowners. Although the shantytowns
lower nearby property values, permanent farmworker housing might
reduce property values even more. "When people find out you
want to build housing for your migrants," one grower told me,
"they just go ballistic."
...
We have been told for years to bow down before "the
market." We have placed our faith in the laws of supply and
demand. What has been forgotten, or ignored, is that the market
rewards only efficiency. Every other human value gets in its way.
The market will drive wages down like water, until they reach the
lowest possible level.
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