Expensive Food and H2A

Tough anti-undocumented immigrant legislation is quite de rigueur in state laws these days, especially harsh in Arizona and Alabama and rather unwelcoming in states like Georgia, South Carolina and Indiana as well. The Obama administration is challenging these statutes on the grounds that they impinge on the right of the federal government to control foreign policy matters. In impaired economic times, voters are railing against folks other than Americans absorbing benefits and taking away jobs, enough so that a once top-of-the-heap presidential candidate – Rick Perry – lost major footing in his poll standings by suggesting that undocumented children could partake in Texas post-secondary educational programs if otherwise qualified.

With food prices skyrocketing for any number of reasons, slamming average Americans when they can least afford it, our immigration policies are aggravating the issue by driving labor costs up for jobs that American residents don’t seem to be willing to take under any unemployment scenario or at any price. There is a federal visa program that allows the importation of guest agricultural workers: “An H-2A visa allows a foreign national entry into the U.S. for temporary or seasonal agricultural work. There are several requirements of the employer in regards to this visa. The H-2A temporary agricultural program establishes a means for agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring non-immigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature. Currently in the United States there are about 30,000 temporary agricultural workers under this visa program. All of these workers are supposed to be covered by U.S. wage laws, workers’ compensation and other standards.” Wikipedia. This effectively translates into jobs that pay at least $10.50 an hour.

You’d think out-of-work Americans would leap into this fray and accept those $10.50/hours jobs so that guest-workers would not be necessary, but the stoop labor is often grueling and tedious, and strangely enough, there are very few American residents willing to accept the seasonal picking and harvesting jobs available. As crops rot on the vine or on in the field or fall overripe from the trees to spoil on the ground, the severe labor shortage has created both waste as well as higher prices at the market.

The October 5^th New York Times produced one very typical example in Olathe, Colorado where corn and onion crops reached harvest time, one that questions what to do when in times of high unemployment, there is still a deep shortage of agricultural workers: “That’s the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado… The simple-sounding plan that resulted — hire more local people and fewer foreign workers [under the H2A program] — left Mr. Harold and others who took a similar path adrift in a predicament worthy of Kafka… The more they tried to do something concrete to address immigration and joblessness, the worse off they found themselves… ‘It’s absolutely true that people who have played by the rules are having the toughest time of all,’ said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado… This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual [H2A] contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“‘It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,’ Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them… Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.” With the locals gone, the remaining crew did the best it could.

The story repeats itself all across the land, especially in the immigration-unfriendly states, like Alabama: “In northeast Alabama, the owners of Smith & Smith Farms were trying to harvest 90 acres of tomatoes with three trucks of workers each day instead of the usual 12… ‘We have hired some whites,’ said Kathy Smith, wife of co-owner Leroy Smith. ‘Some of them work out a little bit. Some might work three hours and they quit.’ … Jimmy Latham, a Tuscaloosa contractor and president of Alabama Associated General Contractors, said the law would slow down the rebuilding effort underway in the wake of the devastating spring tornadoes. … ‘We're seeing smaller crews and seeing work taking longer to accomplish,’ he said. The [anti-immigration] bill’s authors, he said, may have assumed that native Alabamians would take the jobs that Latinos left behind, with state unemployment at 10%... ‘That has not been the case so far,’ he said.” Washington Post, October 8^th.

The anti-undocumented frenzy has left way too many American farmers in the lurch: “The H-2A program, in particular, in trying to avoid displacing American citizens from jobs, strongly encourages farmers to hire locally if they can, with a requirement that they advertise in at least three states. That forces participants to take huge risks in guessing where a moving target might land — how many locals, how many foreigners — often with an entire season’s revenue at stake. Survival, not civic virtue, drives the equation, they say.

“‘Farmers have to bear almost all the labor market risk because they must prove no one really was available, qualified or willing to work,’ said Dawn D. Thilmany, a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University. ‘But the only way to offer proof is to literally have a field left unharvested.’

“Mr. Harold’s experience is a repeated refrain where farm labor is seasonal and population sparse. And even many immigration hard-liners have come to agree that the dearth of Americans willing to work the fields requires some sort of rethinking, at least, of the H-2A program. Indeed, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a conservative Republican, is pushing a bill that would greatly expand the number of foreign guest workers admitted to the country each year.” NY Times. What do you want from a nation whose legislators govern by reacting to the latest polls instead of leading, where people think slogans and doctrinaire stubbornness are good substitutes for common sense? For a nation of immigrants [insert image of Ellis Island], we really need to understand that to effect our goals, we really need to understand that pragmatism is the only solution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the way people form opinions these days on how to run this great nation never ceases to amaze me!