March 25, 2008
A Test Case for Immigration
Posted by TOM BEVAN | E-Mail This | Permalink | Email Author

This is an interesting story: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_pa ... gress.html . Keith Eckel, the largest tomato grower north of the Mason-Dixon line whose crop accounts for 3/4 of the fresh tomatoes sold in markets from Boston to Washington, is quitting the tomato business over fears that he won't be able to find the 180 workers he needs for harvest. Instead, Eckel is planting grain, which he can harvest by machine with the help of only 5 workers.

Eckel told the Philadelphia Inquirer he was forced to scuttle his tomato business because of Congress's failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, saying more and more farmers would follow suit when faced with the prospect of a labor shortage.

Here's the part of the story that caught my attention:

Workers on Eckel's farm averaged $16.59 an hour "and they earned every penny of it," Eckel said.
"No one will harvest tomatoes in 90 degree weather except immigrant labor," he said. And a number of people who worked in his packing house were retired workers picking up a few extra dollars, he said.
We always hear the argument that immigrants do labor that Americans aren't willing to do, and picking tomatoes would certainly seem to fall into that category. But $16.59 an hour seems like a pretty decent average wage, and so the question is whether in a place like Scranton - a metro area with more than 600,000 people and an unemployment rate that jumped seven tenths of a percent in December and is above both the state and national average - Eckel truly cannot find a hundred and eighty legal US citizens who want to make, on average, $16.59 an hour.

The bigger problem may be, as Eckel points out in the article, bearing the burden and the risk associated with verifying that his workers are in fact here legally:

He said the climate was such that legal immigrants were fearful of moving across state lines, further exacerbating the problem.
Although his workers have documents proving that they are legal, Eckel said some estimates show that between 60 percent and 70 percent of the documents are fraudulent.

"We can no longer take the risk," he said. "We have done everything we can to comply with the law." Most farmers are honest, he said, but rather than run the risk of losing their crop, they simply won't plant one.