Mexican Workers and U.S. Agriculture: The Revolving Door

Mexicun Workers und US. Agriculture: The Revolving Door

Philip Martin University of Califarnia, Davis

Western U.S. agriculture is an industry that has shaped and been shaped by a peculiar labor policy: seasonal workers were outsiders who looked to agriculture for jobs, not careers. They did not plan to remain farm workers, and the industry and community in which they worked and lived did not see them as long-term settlers. The immigration and integration policy, in effect, was to recruit new workers willing to accommodate themselves to seasonal employment, and to avoid their integration in agricultural areas. Thus, for most immigrant workers, economic mobility required eograph-

upward mobility of immigrant farm workers and their children; it is how U.S. agriculture should gain access to immigrant farm workers.

ic mobility. However, the major policy issue is not how to en i? ance the

Agriculture is a frequently misunderstood industry. Farming is ofcen considered a crown jewel of the U.S. economy, a reflection of the fact that relatively low expenditures on food mean that consumers have more money to buy other goods. The U.S. has about two million farms, defined as places that normally sell $1,000 or more of farm goods in one year. Farmers had cash receipts from sales of food and fiber of $223 billion in 2000, and about 25 percent of US. farm production was exported, continuing a consistent U.S. agricultural trade surplus.1

This picture of an efficient agricultural sector in which family farmers provide a living link to the founding fathers is clouded by the fact that most U.S. farms lose money farming, and that government payments typically account for 25 to 50 percent of net farm income.* The value of U.S. farm land and buildings was $1.1 trillion in 2000, and these assets generated a net cash income of $56 billion, of which $22 billion or 39 percent was direct government payments to farmers.

There are many ways to analyze farm structure. Traditionally, farms were grouped by their annual farm sales. The 1997 Census of Agriculture (COA),

]In 2000, farm exports were $51 billion, and imports were $39 billion, for a $12 billion trade surplus. 2Not all farmers receive government payments; in 1999, about 42 percent of U.S. farms received an average of $16,800 in government payments. Farms not receiving government payments had average gross cash incomes of $44,200, probably not generating enough net cash income to support a family.

0 2002 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved. 01 98-91 83/02/3604.0140

1124 ZMR Volume 36 Number 4 (Winter 2002):1124-1142

MEXICAN WORKERS AND U.S. AGRICULTURE 1125

for example, found 1.9 million U.S. farms that sold commodities worth $197 billion. When the number of farms is compared to their share of total farm sales, the result is an X-shaped distribution, in which the 51 percent of small farms that had sales of less than $lO,OOO (and on average lost money farming) accounted for 1 percent of total farm sales, while the 26,000 largest farms that each had $1 million or more in sales accounted for 42 percent of total farm sales. If farmers are asked their main occupation, two thirds of U.S. “farmers” say they are something other than farmers - most are retired or are pri- marily nonfarm workers who operate a farm part time.

TABLE I ~~~~~ ~

U.S. FARM STRUmRE: 1997 CENSUS OF AGRICULTURE Farm Sales($) Farms (%) Sales (%) Under 10,000 51 1 10-25,000 13 25-50,000 9 50-100,000 8 100-250,000 10 250-500,000 5 500-1 mil 2

2 3 6

15 15 15

1 mil or more 1 42 Source: Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1999, Table 1 1 05. Note: There were 1.9 million farms with $197 billion in farm sales.

Although these data make it clear that it is hard to generalize about “the average farmer,” there are two characteristics of most farmers that affect the immigration and integration of farm workers: First, the 1997 COA reported that 98 percent of U.S. farmers were white, and that 28,000 or 1.5 percent were Hispanic, ie., even though Hispanics are about 90 percent of farm workers, very few are farm operators. Second, farmers are much older than farm workers: the average age of farmers in 1997 was 54, and 48 percent were 55 or older. The average age of hired crop workers was 31 in 1997-98, and 67 percent were under 35 (U.S. Department of Labor, NAWS, 2000:9).

There are three other background facts about agriculture and farming that affect immigration and integration policies:

Agriculture was the largest U.S. industry until early in the twentieth century, and its status an economic success story gives farmers advocating favorable labor and immigration policies a powerful position at the political bargaining table. Agriculture is an industry in which the number of employers, about 650,000 in the 1997 COA, is high relative to the number of employ- ees, about 2.5 million. This makes farm employers more important in

1126 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

employer organizations than farm workers are in employee organizations. Agriculture is a widely-dispersed industry familiar with obtaining government assistance in areas ranging from subsidized inputs such as water to special marketing and export promotion programs. The political influence of agriculture is noticeable in the U.S. Congress: agriculture tends to have more support in the Senate than in the House.

The subsector of U.S. agriculture that is most closely associated with immigration is so-called FVH agriculture, the 208,000 U.S. farms in 1997 that produced fruits and nuts (86,000), vegetables and melons (54,000), and hor- ticultural specialties (68,000) such as flowers and nursery products. Not all of these farms report hiring labor - 86,000 reported hired farm labor expenses in 1997, and the distribution of these hired farm labor expenses is very similar to the distribution of farm production, viz , the largest farms account for most of the hired labor expenses. The Census of Agriculture does not provide the data to calculate the exact shares of hired labor expenses by size of farm, but if each farm assigned to a hired labor expense class had average wages at the midpoint of the class, and the remaining hired labor expenses were paid by the largest farm employers, the result is that the largest 1,809 fruit and nut farms accounted for 87 percent of the hired labor expenses in 1997. This suggests that farm labor is even more concentrated than farm employment.

TABLE 2 HIRED LABOR EXPEh'SE.3 1997

Fruits and Nuts Total Labor Expenses Farms Average* Expenses ($000) Per Farms Per Expenses

~$5,000 in 1997 19,666 2,500 22,166 48% 1% 5-25,000 10,026 12,500 22,526 24% 1 Yo 25- 100,000 7,246 62,500 69,746 18% 3% 100-250,000 2,368 175,000 177,368 6% 8 Yo >250,000 1,809 2,000,000 2,001,809 4% 87% Estimated Total 4 I. 1 I5 2,293.615 Census Total 411115 2,331,413

Source: 1997 Census ofAuiculture, Table 51. - Note: Average' is an estimate of average hired labor expenses for each farm in this group.

The FVH farms that hire most seasonal farm workers would be considered large U.S. employers by any definition. An example is the Zaninovich table grape farm in California's San Joaquin Valley, an operation that hires 1,000 farm workers to produce 5 million 21-pound boxes of table grapes annually. At an average $10 a box, this farm generates sales of about $50 million a year. The grape pickers work 500 to 1000 hours and earn $6 to $8 an


hour, giving them annual grape picking earnings of $3,000 to $8,000. When the federal government makes immigration and labor law exceptions for family farmers, most of the benefits of the exceptions go to the largest farms that hire the most workers.

SEASONALIZ WAGES, AND GUEST WORKERS The demand for hired workers in agriculture is seasonal - more workers are needed during some months of the year than others. The classic response to seasonality was diversified family farming, which is why most U.S. farms were and are crop and livestock enterprises in which all members of typically large families worked during times of peak seasonal labor needs, and family members went to school, tended livestock and had more leisure time in the off season. There were two other U.S. responses to seasonality: slavery and sharecropping in the south, and migrant and seasonal workers in the west. Slavery was economically viable to produce crops such as tobacco and cotton, which needed large quantities of labor for long periods of time, and migrancy was rational for large and specialized farms that needed large numbers of seasonal workers for short periods of time.

The migrant farm labor system depended on an army of workers willing to accommodate themselves to seasonality. Such workers were often hard to find in a society offering upward mobility. In the western states, seasonal workers were usually newcomers to the area who could not find other jobs. The key economic development in the rise of the migrant farm labor system was the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, which lowered transportation costs and encouraged the switch from dryland grain production and cattle grazing to labor-intensive fruit crops, which could be dried or canned and transported to customers in the eastern U.S. When the railroad was completed, there were a relative handful of very large farms, since large units were necessary for dryland agriculture.

The number and size of farms was expected to change in the 1870s and 1880s because:

It was assumed that only family farms could supply the seasonal labor needed for labor-intensive fruit farms. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was expected to end the supply of workers who had no other U.S. job options due to discrimination and lack of skills, and thus were willing to be migrant and seasonal farm workers.

Both assumptions proved false, as large farms were able to switch to labor-


intensive fruit farming by relying on waves of newcomers to the area with few other job options - the Chinese were followed by Japanese immigrants, Indi- ans and Pakistanis, Mexicans, Dust Bowl migrants, and Mexicans again. These waves of immigrant farm workers willing to work at relatively low wages when they were needed held down farm production costs, and raised the price of California farm land - the low wages paid to farm workers were capitalized into higher land prices. Land owners whose wealth was increased by low farm wages strongly resisted immigration and labor policy changes that might have raised wages and reduced land prices.

The U.S. came closest to changing the structure of western agriculture in the late 1930s, but instead opted for a guest worker program that became the basis for Mexico-U.S. migration today. The 1930s were the decade of the Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel published in 1940. Steinbeck‘s description of the lives of Dust Bowl migrants in California reportedly prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to say that “something must be done and done soon” about farm labor in California. A Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate’s Education and Labor Committee chaired by Robert LaFollette, Jr. (R-WI) held hearings on the conditions of farm workers, and recommended an end to “agricultural exceptionalism,” the tendency to exclude agriculture from labor law protections and obligations.

Instead of farm labor reforms, the outbreak of World War I1 allowed farmers to successfully press for the importation of Mexican workers under a series of Bracero or guest worker programs. Farm labor reformers opposed importing Mexican workers, but the pleas of farmers for labor to produce “food to win the way3 as well as foreign policy interests that wanted a guest worker program to enlist Mexico’s support in the war effort led to the Bracero program, an exception in immigration law for “native-born residents of North America, South America, and Central America, and the islands adja- cent thereto, desiring to perform agricultural labor in the United States.” Over the next 22 years, under several programs, some 4.6 million Mexicans were admitted temporarily to do farm work. Many Braceros returned year after year, but one to two million Mexicans gained U.S. work experience as a result of their participation in the Bracero program.

3111 one carefully phrased summary of the need for additional labor in 1942, the Congressional Research Service noted that “Many of the reports of [labor] shortages in specific areas were based, not so much on the inadequacy of a supply sufficient to maintain full production, as on inability to continue the peacetime methods of employment, with underemployment and low wages.” (Congressional Research Service, 1980: 16).

MEXICAN WORKERS AND U.S. AGRICUITURE 1129

As with most guest worker programs, the major effects of the Bracero

Legal Braceros were accompanied by illegal migrants and rising legal immigration. During the 22 years of Bracero programs, there were 4.6 million Bracero admissions and 5.3 million apprehensions (both data series count events, not individuals). Legal Mexican immigration rose from 6,000-7,000 a year in the mid-1940s to 55,000 a year in the early 1960s.

program became apparent only over time. Three effects stand out:

TABLE 3 bflXlCAN BRACEROS, APPREHENSIONS, AND IhlMIGRANTS: 1942-64

Year Bracero Admissions Apprehensions Mex Immigrants 1942 4,203 1 1,784 2,378 1943 52,098 11,175 4,172 1944 62,170 31,174 6,598 1945 49,454 69,164 6,702 1946 32,043 99,591 7,146 1947 19,632 193,657 7,558 1948 35,345 192,779 8,384 1949 107,000 288,253 8,803 1950 67,500 468,339 6,744 1951 192,000 509,040 6,153 1952 197,100 528,815 9,079 1953 201,380 885,587 17,183 1954 309,033 1,089,583 30,645 1955 398,650 254,096 43,702 1956 445,197 87,696 61,320 1957 436,049 59,918 49,321 1958 432,857 53,474 26,721 1959 437,643 45,336 22,909 1960 3 15,846 70,684 32,708 1961 291,420 88,823 4 1,476 1962 194,978 92,758 55,805 1963 186,865 88,712 55,986 1964 177,736 86,597 34,448

4,646,199 5,307,035 545,941 Sources: Congressional Research Service, 1980; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agricul- ture, 1963.

The availability of Braceros permitted the southwestern states to become the garden states of the U.S. California fruit and vegetable production rose sharply in the 1950s, but average farm worker earnings rose much slower than factory wages: farm workers’ wages rose from $0.85 an hour in 1950 to $1.20 an hour in 1960, while factory workers’ wages rose from $1.60 to $2.60 an hour, i.e., farm wages fell from 53 to 46 percent of factory wages during the 1950s. Braceros in the fields and a booming nonfarm economy encouraged .


Mexican-Americans in the southwest to change from a predominantly rural to a mostly urban population, reinforcing the truism that economic mobility required geographic mobility.

The Bracero program ended in 1964, ushering in a golden age for farm workers that lasted until about 1980. During this golden age, farm worker earnings rose faster than construction workers' earnings, and there was a widespread expectation that the farm labor market would evolve like that in construction, viz, a heavily unionized industry in which the union organized the seasonal labor market by operating hiring halls to deploy seasonal workers to farms as needed. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers seemed to prove this theory of inevitable and desired labor market evolution true when in 1966 the union won a 40 percent wage increase for many table grape pickers, raising their wages from at least $1.25 to $1.75 an hour. However, this golden age for farm workers began to fade in the early 1980s, a result of leadership fumbles within the UFW, a switch from Democratic to Republican governors and thus changes in appointments to the board that administered the state farm labor relations law, rising illegal immigration, and a changing structure of agriculture - large growers realized that they could avoid union problems by hiring farm workers via intermediaries rather than directly.

The major issue that would affect farm worker immigration and integration in the early 1980s was what to do about illegal immigration. The unauthorized share of the farm work force was estimated to be about 25 percent in California (and much lower elsewhere in the U.S.) but farmers opposed the Grand Bargain of employer sanctions to stop illegal immigration, and amnesty for unauthorized foreigners that was recommended by the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 198 1. Farmers, fearing a loss of unauthorized farm workers, showed that they could block this Grand Bargain in Congress unless they were assured a replacement supply of legal guest workers.

Farmers persuaded Congress to approve, over the bitter objections of Rep. Ron Mazzoli (D-KY) and Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY), guest worker programs in the House (1984) and the Senate (1985) that were to their lik- ing. These guest worker programs for agriculture were distinguished by allowing U.S. farmers to obtain legal guest workers without having the U.S. Department of Labor certify a farmer's need for guest workers on a job-by- job basis. Certification allowed DOL rather than farmers to control the border gate, permitted the government to require farmers to provide housing for


guest workers, and the government could require farmers to hire U.S. workers who applied for jobs, including union supporters.

IRCA: SAWS AND RAWS

The farm labor compromise that enabled the Immigration Reform and Con- trol Act of 1986 to become law was reached in private negotiations during the summer of 1986. The compromise had two major elements: an easy legalization program for currently illegal workers, the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program, and two guest worker programs through which farmers could obtain additional workers in the event of labor shortages: an H-2A certification program, under which farmers had to provide housing and demonstrate to the satisfaction of DOL that they tried and failed to find U.S. workers, and a noncertification Replenishment Agricultural Worker (RAW) program that would allow foreign farm workers to circulate within agricultural regions in the U.S. (there were no farm labor shortages in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so this program never went into effect, and detailed regulations were not developed).

A major goal of the SAW-RAW program was to give agriculture a legal work force, the theory being that legal workers would be more likely to join unions and press for wage increases at the bargaining table. The assumption was that, with stepped-up border control efforts and employer sanctions “clos- ing the door” to unauthorized workers, U.S. farmers would have no choice but to raise wages and improve conditions in order to retain legal workers.

IRCA’s legalization programs were considered very successful, legalizing 2.7 million foreigners, but border controls and employer sanctions failed to stop illegal immigration, largely because of inadequate enforcement and the proliferation of false documents. The major legalization surprise was in the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program, which allowed unauthorized foreigners who could prove that they did at least 90 days of farm work in 1985-86 to become legal immigrants. There was no official estimate of the number of qualifying unauthorized farm workers, but Congress and the INS accepted a USDA estimate of 350,000 unauthorized farm workers, and made this number the maximum number of Group I SAWs, who could obtain immigrant status sooner than other SAWs.4

*Group I SAWs did at least 90 days of Seasonal Agricultural Services (SAS) work - work on crop farms - in each of the years ending on May 1, 1984, 1985, and 1986. Group I1 SAWs, by contrast, did 90 days of SAS work only in the year ending May 1, 1986. Over 90 percent of all SAW applicants were in the Group I1 category.

1132 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION &VIEW

However, 1.3 million aliens applied for SAW status, or almost three- fourths as many as the 1.8 million who applied for the general legalization program, even though it was widely asserted that only 15 to 20 percent of the undocumented workers in the United States in the mid-1980s were employed in agriculture. SAW applicants turned out to be mostly young Mexican men - their median age was 24, and 82 percent were male. In surveys, SAWS had an average 5 years of education and earned between $30 and $35 daily for 100 days of farm work in 1985-86, ie., $3,000 to $3,500 a year.

TABLE 4 IRCA LEGALIZATION APPLICANTS

Characteristic Pre-1982“ SAW Median Age at Entry 23 24

1 . Age 15 to& (%) 80 2. Male(%) 57 3. Married (%) 41 4. From Mexico (%) 70 5 . Applied in California (Yo) 54

93 82 42 82 52

Total Appli&ts 1,759,705 1,272,143 Source: INS Statistical Yearbook, 1991. Notes: “Persons filing 1-687 legalization applications.

bPersons filing 1-700 legalization applications. About 80,000 farm workers received legal immigrant status under the pre-1982 legalization program.

The SAW program was a turning point for immigration and integration

First, the program was riddled with fraud. The 350,000 estimate was probably closer to the true number of qualifying unauthorized farm workers than the 1.3 million applications, or the 1.2 million foreigners who became legal immigrants through the SAW program. Most SAW applicants submitted a letter with their application for legalization, often signed by a farm labor contractor, that asserted “Juan Gonzalez picked tomatoes for 92 days in Salinas for me in 1986.” This letter was sufficient to obtain an immigration visa, so that the SAW program taught a generation of farm workers how to use to false documents to obtain immigration benefits. Second, the SAW program had massive impacts in rural Mexico. There were only about six million adult men in rural Mexico in the mid- 1980s, and the SAW program enabled about one million of them to become legal U.S. immigrants. Their family members were not legal- ized, because it was widely asserted that Mexican farm workers simply wanted to cross the border legally - they did not want to move to the U.S. with their families. This stay-in-Mexico assumption proved to be

in U.S. agriculture for two major reasons: .


false, as a combination of nonfarm job opportunities in the U.S., as well as changes in rural Mexico, encouraged many SAWs to settle in the U.S. with their families.

THE QUEST FOR SEASONAL WOIiKERS History is repeating itself in agriculture. Since 1986, labor-intensive agricultural production has expanded, especially in remote areas of the U.S. where there is little infrastructure for migrant workers, such as southwestern Flori- da (oranges) and central Washington (apples). Most of the SAWs who were in the their twenties in the late 1980s have moved out of farm work, and the farm work force is about 55 percent unauthorized. IRCA shows that giving legal status to 1.2 million unauthorized “farm workers” improved conditions and opportunities for many individuals, but did not improve farm worker wages and working conditions relative to the nonfarm labor market.

TABLE 5 SAWS AND UNAUTHORlZED CROP WORKERS: 1989-98

1989 37 8 SAWs Unauthorized

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

30 27 23 12 20 19 16 17

17 19 33 44 38 40 50 51

1998 15 52 Source: National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS).

IRCA created a Commission on Agricultural Workers (CAW) to review the effects of legalization and enforcement on the farm labor market. The grower-dominated CAW made three major findings in its 1992 report:

CAW concluded that virtually all SAW-eligible undocumented workers gained legal status, but so many other unauthorized did as well that the SAW program was “one of the most extensive immigration frauds ever perpetrated against the U.S. government.” CAW attributed the declining farm wages and working conditions observed in the early 1990s to a continued influx of illegal workers, and called for stepped up enforcement of U.S. immigration and labor laws. CAW noted the widespread poverty of farm workers, and recommended more social services for farm workers and their children and better enforcement of labor laws, but divided on the question of ending agri-


cultural exceptionalism - a majority of commissioners supported ending the quilt of immigration and labor exceptions for agriculture.

Farmers were disappointed that CAW did not recommend a continuation of the RAW program or new guest worker program, but there were few labor shortages in the early 1990s that could have justified such a program.

Beginning in 1995, western farm employers pressed for an alternative to the H-2A guest worker program that would impose fewer requirements on them. Farmers argued in Congressional hearings that the H-2A program was “broken,” as evidenced by the declining number of U.S. farm jobs certified by DOL as needing to be filled with H-2A foreign workers - the low point was reached in 1995, the year after the Florida sugarcane harvest was mechanized.

TABLE 6 H-2A CERTIFI~AXION~: 1985-99

Workers Fiscal year Certified Sugarcane Tobacco Sheep

1985 20,682 10,017 831 1,433 1986 21,161 10,052 594 1,043 1987 24,532 10,616 1,333 1,639 1988 23,745 10,751 2,795 1,655 1989 26,607 10,610 3,752 1,581 1990 25,412 9,550 4,666 1,677 1991 25,702 7,978 2,257 1,557 1992 18,939 4,271 3,080 1,522 1993 17,000 2,319 3,570 1,111 1994 15,811 1,419 3,720 1,305 1995 15,117 4,116 1,350 1996 19,103 9,756 1,366 1997 23,562 14,483 1,667 1998 34,898 16,984 i ,961 1999 41,827 2000 44,017

Source: H-2A Report, Annual, U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Foreign Labor Certifications. Notes: The sugarcane harvest was mechanized after 1995. The 1996 and 1997 tobacco certifications include some vegetable workers.

Farmers wanted a noncertification alternative to the H-2A program, and their cause was helped by sporadic enforcement efforts that made the growers’ Washington lobbyists’ argument that a Republican-controlled Con- gress would be sympathetic to a new guest worker program seem credible. In 1997, a bill was introduced to create a 24-month pilot program administered by USDA for 25,000 temporary foreign agricultural workers a year, with employers gaining access to these workers by attesting that they satisfied recruitment and wage obligations in a process similar to that used to admit H-1B workers. However, this push for a new guest worker program was

MWCAN WORKERS AND U.S. AGRICULTURE 1135

stalled when the General Accounting Office released a report in December 1997 that concluded there is “no national agricultural labor shortage at this time” and that “A sudden, widespread farm labor shortage requiring the importation of large numbers of foreign workers is unlikely to occur in the near future.”

However, in July 1998, the U.S. Senate approved the Agricultural Job Opportunity Benefits and Security Act of 1998, or AgJOBS bill, on a 68-31 vote - AgJOBS was attached to the Commerce-Justice-State Department appropriations bill. AgJOBS created a new guest worker program, and got around the certification-attestation issue by ordering the creation of registries in each state that would register legally authorized farm workers who were available to be deployed to farms to fill seasonal jobs. Farmers would apply to the registry for workers, and the registry would have to refer the number of workers requested or certify that the farmer needed foreign workers, e.g., if 100 workers were requested, and only 60 workers were on the registry, the farmer would be certified to employ 40 foreigners.

Under M O B S , as many foreign workers as needed to fill farmer request-registry gaps could enter the U.S. for up to 10 months per year. If too many stayed longer than 10 months in the U.S., up to 20 percent of their earnings could be withheld, and returned to the worker only in Mexico when the guest worker surrendered his “counterfeit-proof” identification. AgJOBS eliminated the requirement that farm employers must provide free housing to legal guest workers; instead, farm employers had the option of providing a “housing allowance to foreign guest workers.”

There was widespread opposition to AgJOBS. A majority of the House signed a letter asserting that AgJOBS “will only further burden our communities without providing a long-term solution to the labor needs of the agricultural industry.” President Clinton threatened to veto the appropriations bill if it included M O B S , and so the program was removed. However, in 1999 some “immigration advocates” joined farm employers in advocating a new guest worker program. Rick Swarm, founder of the National Immigra- tion Forum, was hired by farmers to find a compromise guest worker program, and Demetrios Papademetriou of the Carnegie Endowment’s Migra- tion Policy Institute recommended a guest worker program with most of the features desired by farmers, including a registry, a farm worker trust fund to encourage returns, and housing vouchers - the only pro-worker recommen- dation was for improved enforcement of labor laws in agriculture. Most farm worker advocates remained adamantly opposed to a new guest worker pro-

1136 INTEFWATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

gram, and their opposition, combined with the absence of farm labor shortages, prevented enactment of any new program in 1999 and 2000.

The momentum for a new guest worker program continued to build, as governors on both sides of the border and the Mexican government expressed support for a new guest worker program. In October 1999, a new version of M O B S was introduced: S.1814 was AgJOBS with an earned legalization program, and S. 18 15 was only an earned legalization program. Earned legalization meant that unauthorized workers who could prove that they did at least 150 days or 880 hours of farm work in the 12 months ending October 27, 1999 could apply for new temporary resident status. In order to maintain this temporary resident status, and eventually convert it to an immigrant status, the temporary residents would have had to do at least 180 days of farmwork each year for five years, and to leave the U.S. each year for at least 65 days. After receiving immigrant status, the immigrant worker could apply for immigration visas for his family.

If labor shortages developed, additional foreign workers would have been admitted under a revised H-2A program that would have eliminated most of the worker protections, including the requirement that farmers attempt to recruit U.S. workers under DOL-set guidelines, that farmers guar- antee work for at least three fourths of the time they say they will need workers, and that farmers continue to hire U.S. workers who seek jobs until the work is at least 50 percent completed.

There were Congressional hearings on a new guest worker program in 2000, but Rep. Cal Dooley (D-CA) proved to be correct when he predicted in June 2000 that a new guest worker program for agriculture would be too controversial to be approved in an election year. During the Congressional hearings, growers testified that there were no farm labor shortages, but there were shortages of “legally authorized farm workers. Farmers said they became aware of just how many unauthorized workers they had when they received letters from the Social Security Administration informing them of “mismatches” between the names and Social Security Numbers they provid- ed - 20 to 50 percent of their workers could be mismatches.

In fall 2000, there was a renewed push for a new guest worker program. To head it off, U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman sent a letter to Congres- sional leaders that said: “The President has been and remains opposed to estab- lishing a new agricultural guestworker program . . . if [AgJOBS] were present- ed to the President, I would recommend that he veto it.” After the November 2000 eiections, there was another push, and some worker advocates, noting


that both U.S. President Bush and Mexican President Fox favored a new guest worker program, thought they could get a better deal for farm workers under President Clinton than Bush. They came close to agreement in the so-called December 2000 Compromise, which would have admitted additional guest workers for agriculture under,the current H-2A program but: 1) 2)

frozen the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (MU%) for two or three years; given H-2A workers 25 percent of the Section 8 housing allowance for a region instead of free housing if the governor of a state certified there was sufficient housing availab1e;s and granted temporary resident status to unauthorized farm workers who did at least 100 days of farm work in the preceding 18 months. If a pro- bationary immigrant did at least 360 days of farm work in the next six years, including 275 days in the first three years, he could obtain an immigrant status.

Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) blocked enactment of the December 2000 Cmpromise, and called instead for a guest worker program that would not lead to the settlement of Mexican workers in the U.S. Gramm’s proposal marks one end of the spectrum, which has three major options: guest workers only, legalization only, and guest workers and legalization combined. Gramm’s proposal would permit unauthorized Mexicans already in the U.S. to obtain seasonal or year-round work permits. Seasonal guest workers could return to the U.S. indefinitely, while year-round workers could work in the U.S. three consecutive years and then have to stay in Mexico at least one year before returning. Gramm’s proposal would give unauthorized workers and their U.S. employers six months to register for the new program, and then enforcement of employer sanctions laws would be stepped-up and penalties for employing unauthorized workers would increase. The 15.3 percent paid by employers and workers for social security would be diverted to a fund to provide emergency medical care for guest workers, with the balance placed in individual IRA-type funds that Mexican workers can receive when they give up their work permits in Mexico.

The other extreme is legalization only, the option favored by the AFL- CIO and most immigrant advocates. The AFL-CIO called for a general legalization program for unauthorized foreigners in the U.S., but no new guest

3)

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worker program, and met with Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-IL), who on Feb- ruary 7, 2001 introduced H.R. 500, the U.S. Employee, Family Unity and Legalization Act, that would grant temporary legal status to persons in the U.S. before February 6, 2000, and immediate immigrant status to persons in the U.S. before February 6, 1996. The legalization date would then roll forward one year in each of the next five years, eventually encompassing all of those now illegally in the U.S.

The third option was the December 2000 Compromise, which involved Senator Bob Graham (D-FL), Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) and Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) as well as the United Farm Workers and the National Council of Agricultural Employers. The Compromise includes the legalization program of AgJOBS, but maintains most of the worker protections under the current H-2A program. The Compromise would:

grant temporary resident alien status to unauthorized farm workers who could prove that they did at least 100 days of farm work during one of the two seasons before the law was passed.6 Temporary resident aliens could enter and leave the U.S. and work in most U.S. jobs, but not receive welfare benefits. After satisfying a three-part farmwork test, temporary resident aliens (and their families) could become immigrants in 5 to 6 years.' admit additional farm workers under a revised version of the H-2A program, whose major features include attestation replacing certification (government-supervised recruitment), freezing the Adverse Effect Wage Rate at 2000 levels for at least three years,a and allowing farmers in states in which governors certify that there is sufficient housing to pro-

Wnauthorized workers would apply to INS directly or via Qualified Designated Entities. After receiving temporary resident alien status, the worker's family illegally in the U.S. could not be deported if located by the INS, but family members also would not receive work autho- rization. Family members could become legal immigrants along with the farm worker head of household without regard to per country waiting lists or queues. 'Temporary resident aliens could become immigrants if they: 1) did at least 360 days in agriculture within 5.5 years, 2) did at least 240 of those farm work-days during the first three years of the program, and 3) did at least 75 days of farm work per year in each of at least three years. The temporary alien workers could also do nonfarm work, but it would not count toward immigrant status. Farm employers would be required to provide both temporary resident aliens and the INS with employee work histories. *Under the current and compromise H-2A programs, farmers who want to employ H-2A workers must pay the higher of three wage rates: the federal or state minimum wage, the local prevailing wage for the particular job, or the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), the average hourly earnings of crop and livestock workers as measured in a USDA survey of farm employers the year before. AEWRs in 2000 were $6.50 to $7 an hour.

MEXICAN WORKERS AND U.S. ACMCULTURE 1139

vide non-local U.S. and H-2A workers with a housing allowance instead of free housing.9 Most H-2A requirements do not apply if the employer has a collective bargaining agreement with a union.

Regardless of which approach or combination of approaches is enacted, there is little prospect that immigrant farm workers will be integrated into agriculture, replacing farmers who retire. Instead, agriculture appears likely to remain a port of entry for immigrants with little education. Most will remain seasonal workers for 10 to 20 years, and then they and their children will seek nonfarm jobs. Most new farm workers are drawn from the ranks of the rural poor abroad. If the U.S. mobility escalator works as well in the twenty-first century as it did in the twentieth century, immigrant farm workers and their children will enjoy upward mobility when they leave the rural and agricultural areas that drew them into the U.S. If the mobility escalator does not work as well, and farm workers remain in rural and agricultural areas, the U.S. may through immigration convert rural Mexican poverty into rural American poverty (Martin, 1999; Taylor, Martin and Fix, 1997).

CONCLUSIONS

Rural and agricultural areas of the U.S. have emerged as important ports of entry, especially for immigrants from rural and agricultural areas abroad - rural Mexicans often begin their American journey in U.S. fields and farm- related industries such as meat and poultry processing. For much of the twentieth century, rural America was a place associated with poverty - it was Michael Harrington’s 1961 book The Other America describing rural poverty that is often credited with launching the U.S. War on Poverty.

Rural poverty was sharply reduced in the 1960s, largely due to rural- urban migration - an average of one million farm residents a year left the farm during the 1960s. Mechanization and the consolidation of farming into fewer and larger units were expected to make the farm labor market much like other U.S. labor markets that hired largely unskilled workers, with a significant role for unions and collective bargaining in a mechanized production system in which workers would spend a career. For a time in the 1970s, it appeared that agriculture was coming to resemble other U.S. labor markets,

’If the governor of the state certifies that there is adequate housing available for U.S. and H- 2A farm workers in the area, employers may provide a housing allowance of at least 25 percent of the fair market rental for HUD Section 8 housing, assuming 2 bedrooms and two workers per bedroom.

I140 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

with ports of entry and job ladders and assertions that there was a need for brains, not brawn.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the farm labor market reversed direction, reverting to the more familiar revolving door, with layers of intermediaries between farm workers and farm operators. There were many reasons for this reversal of what had been a trend toward non-farm or modern personnel practices - personnel managers, written employment applications, and collective bargaining - but two stand out:

changes in the food system that push profits forward toward food retailers and risk and pressure to reduce costs backward toward farmers, and increased illegal immigration from Mexico.

As companies such as United Brands and Dole sold their farming operations and instead bought produce from farmers to supply to food retailers, unions lost the ability to bargain with companies that were accustomed to collective bargaining, and found themselves dealing in many cases with operators who leased land and used labor contractors and other intermediaries to obtain seasonal workers. Farm operators were able to play these intermediaries off against each other, and the result was that “direct hire” farm worker employment fell, and indirect employment through intermediaries, many of whom hired unauthorized workers, rose.

Farm leaders dealing with labor supply issues began to see labor availability much like water availability. Fruit and vegetable land is irrigated, and there are two major options for assuring sufficient water:

Work collectively to “develop” the water supply - to ensure that dams are built to store water, and canals constructed to deliver water so that all farmers have sufficient water. If water is plentiful and cheap, farmers can flood the fields. Aim to minimize the amount of water needed by installing drip irrigation systems - plastic pipes throughout fields that deliver water and fertilizer to each plant. Drip requires less water, but a significant up-front invest- ment is required to install the drip irrigation system.

During the 197Os, rising farm wages and benefits encouraged a “drip- type” approach to farm labor. Many large farmers hired personnel managers, and others formed labor co-ops in which hiring and deployment was handled by professionals. One result was the settlement of farm workers with their families in agricultural communities. However, these settled workers aged- out of especially seasonal farm work that was not mechanized in the 198Os, and were replaced in the fields by young and often unauthorized workers.

MEXICAN WORKERS AND U.S. AGRICUITURE 1141

If the status quo continues, the most likely future for rural America may already be visible in the agricultural areas of California. In the three leading farm counties of the U.S., Fresno, Tulare, and Kern, with combined farm sales of $9 billion in 1999, or more than Pennsylvania and Ohio combined, socio-economic indicators suggest that 30 to 40 percent of residents have incomes below the poverty line, 15 to 25 percent receive welfare assistance, and 10 to 20 percent are unemployed (Taylor and Martin, 2000).

These data suggest that first generation immigrants pick fruits and vegetables seasonally as needed for about 10 years. However, when they age-out of the seasonal farm work force, they have few skills to enable them to climb the farm or nonfarm job ladders, and they are poor and often jobless if they remain in the area. Their children, educated in the U.S., tend to reject seasonal farm jobs - if they remain in the area, they are often poor and on welfare. Thus, the guest worker choices made in 2001 will shape immigration and integration policy as well as the socioeconomic fabric of rural and urban America for decades to come.

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Washington: The Urban Institute Press. Brown, G. K. 1984 “Fruit and Vegetable Mechanization.” In Migrant Labor in Agriculture: A n Internation-

al Comparison. Berkeley: Giannini Foundation. California Assembly Committee on Agriculture 1965 The Bracero Program and its Aftermath: An Historical Summary. Sacramento. April. 1. Congressional Research Service 1980 Temporary Worker Programs: Background and Issues. Prepared for the Senate Com-

Elac, J. 1961 Fuller, V. 1942 The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in

California. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. U.C. Berkeley, 1939. Reprinted in Viola- tions of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor Education and Labor Committee, [The LaFollette Committee] Washington: Senate Education and Labor Committee. 19778- 19894.

Garcia y Griego, M. 1981 The Importation of Mexican Contract Laborers to the United States, 1942-1964:

Antecedents, Operation, and Legacy. La Jolla: Program in U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD, Working Paper 1 1.

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Martin, l?, W. Huffman, R. Emerson, E. Taylor and R. Rochin, eds. 1995 Immigration Reform and US. Agriculture. Berkeley. Division of Agriculture and Natur-

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Taylor, J. E. and l? L. Martin 2000 “California’s New Rural Poverty,” California Agriculture, 54( 1):26-32. Taylor, J. E., P. Martin and M. Fix 1997 Poverty Amid Prosperity: Immigration and the Changing Face of Rural California. Wash-

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Documents

Mexican Workers and U.S. Agriculture: The Revolving Door