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Article Last Updated: 4/24/2006 06:50 AM


Farmers fear fallout from migrant bills
Crop owners say legislation barring illegals could devastate industry, drive up food prices
By Barbara Grady, BUSINESS WRITER
Inside Bay Area

ROWS OF ALMOND AND FRUIT TREES stretch as far as the eye can see in Manteca, interrupted only by vast yards of dairy cows and grasslands. This is farm country, one town in the great Central Valley, which supplies more than half the nation's fruits and vegetables and virtually all its almonds, walnuts and raisins.
Under the rainy skies of April, few workers can be seen in these orchards or in the dairy farms' alfalfa fields.

But come August and September, several hundred workers will be needed in Manteca alone to harvest the fruit and nuts growing so lusciously here. The questionon farmers' minds is: Will there be enough workers?

"It's getting harder to find workers. Three-quarters of the guys go into construction," says Jim Van Laar, an almond grower in Manteca.

"Farming absolutely depends on seasonal workers," said Dave Phippen, part owner of another Manteca almond tree farm stretching across 600 acres.

Almond growers have it easier than fruit and vegetable growers because almond harvesting is mechanized.

Along coastal San Mateo County, Joe Mucci relies on many extra hands to pick his 350 acres of Brussels sprouts, artichokes, beans and other vegetables in harvest season.

As the U.S. Senate and Congress debate various measures to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States, California farmers are keeping a watchful eye. They say they wish the nation's lawmakers — and consumers — would think carefully about how food is grown in the United States.

"If we don't have people coming in here doing our labor, forget it," Mucci said. "Farming would shut down in this country."

Farmers must check for Social Security cards and green cards before hiring anybody. So these farmers said that, to their knowledge, they've been hiring legal workers. But it is well known in California farmlands — and government statistics confirm — that the majority of workers have not obtained their identification cards from authorities.

Farmers say the United States would import all its food if the current supply of seasonal workers is cut off because, as it is, there are not enough.

Indeed, in Fresno and Madera counties, labor shortages resulted in damaged crops of raisin grapes in the past two years.

The work is hard. Field workers interviewed along the San Mateo County coast describe having to bend over for hours at a time for many of the vegetables and grapes. Orchard workers in the Central Valley spend hours with their arms in the air and hoisting filled buckets. Temperatures get hot.

Still, they say it's worth it.

"Many people need that job. They have a lot of family in Guatemala or Mexico," said Juan Garcia, who picked grapes in Healdsburg last harvest season and now is working in Oakland. Garcia, who is a legal immigrant from Guatemala, said that despite the hard work, "everyone wants to come here."

Other workers interviewed, who did not want to give their names because they were not here legally, said the pay is many times what they would make in Mexico, and the treatment is OK.

Still, it is not work that U.S. citizens seem willing to do.

"If we pay $15 to $20 an hour," one farmer said, he could still only get migrant workers. Some farmers, such as Mucci and Phippen, do up the pay to $15 in the tightest of times and still have trouble.

Demographers and immigration specialists who have studied this problem agree.

"There is very little likelihood that enough U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents could be recruited to replace current undocumented farm workers — even at significantly higher than prevailing wages," said professor Wayne Cornelius, director of University of California, San Diego's Center for Comparative Immigration Studies.

Without temporary labor, we would become a nation that imports our food, said farmers who were interviewed for this story.

"If you think it is bad how we depend on other countries for gasoline, just wait until we have to depend on other countries for food," said Susan Quaresma, who owns a dairy farm in Manteca with her husband.

From California to North Carolina, foreign-born migrant workers perform the majority of farm work, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Labor and the University of California agricultural studies division.

In California, 95 percent of farmworkers are foreign born, and 57 percent of them are here without immigration papers or are "unauthorized," according to a joint survey by the University of California and the federal government. The survey of farmworkers, conducted in 2004 and 2005, found that 33 percent of farmworkers were legal permanent residents or "green card" holders, 10 percent were U.S. citizens and 57 percent were unauthorized.

Some organizations say the 57 percent figure is conservative, since it is based on farmworkers' own admissions. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that half to two-thirds of California farmworkers are unauthorized, while the United Farm Workers union puts that number at 90 percent in the strawberry and grape regions of California.

"Our experience in California is the overwhelming majority of farmworkers are unauthorized," said Marc Grossman of the UFW.

The reason farmworkers — as well as hotel custodians and restaurant dish washers — are disproportionately noncitizens is simply supply and demand economics: There is ongoing demand in the United States for workers to do low-wage, physically demanding work, yet very few U.S. citizens apply for these jobs.

Meanwhile, a steady flow of immigrant workers present themselves willing to do the work, most carrying green cards and Social Security cards obtained through various means — many of them phony. The other part of the economic puzzle: Wages for comparable work in Mexico are about one-eighth the wages earned here.

"It is not enough to survive on for one person, let alone support a family," said one migrant worker in Pescadero, interviewed through a translator, about doing farm work in his native Michoacan, Mexico. He has been harvesting vegetables at farms in southern San Mateo County for about eight years, crossing the border every couple of years to see his family. Field workers can earn in one hour the equivalent of a day's work in Mexico.

Farming, however, is not the main U.S. employer of the immigrant population — far from it. Only 1 million of the 11.5 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country work in farming, according to estimates by the Department of Labor and the United Farm Workers. Many more work in construction, in hospitality cleaning hotel rooms and restaurant floors, and as domestic workers cleaning houses and mowing lawns.

It's just that farming has a very dependent relationship with migrant workers, and if measures passed by Congress do not address that, our food supply or the prices we pay for food are likely to change drastically. And the impact would be significant in California, the nation's most productive agricultural state with direct farm sales in 2004 of $32 billion.

"If we run the farmworkers out of this country, we are going to be dependent on other countries for our food — just like the gas situation, we're going to be dependent on other countries," said B.J. Burns, a fifth-generation farmer in coastal San Mateo County.

Proponents of stricter immigration regulations, such as returning unauthorized immigrants to their homelands and more tightly controlling the U.S. borders, have been driven in large part by the escalating number of unauthorized immigrants who enter the country each year. In the past five years, an average of 850,000 came to the United States each year without authorization — double the yearly average of a decade earlier, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization.

U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, voted with the majority of the House of Representatives in December for a bill that would police the borders and make it a felony to be in this country without proper authorization.

"It is not perfect legislation," said Pombo spokeswoman Nicole Philbin. "To the Congressman, border security is paramount, and that is what drove his support for the legislation," she said.

The Senate has considered a more lenient bill but has not passed anything.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, before its two-week Easter recess, had approved an immigration reform package that included tighter enforcement of immigration laws but also provisions for more guest workers and residency permits. It included a special measure for farmworkers proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., which would allow up to 1.5 million farmworkers to become legal residents if they could prove they worked in agriculture 150 days in the past two years and they continued to work in agriculture 150 days a year.

Many farmers interviewed said their hope is that Feinstein's proposal gets passed by the full Senate and House and becomes law.

Farmers want Congress to expand and revise the guest worker program — now a minuscule program — known as H-2A visas, which accounts for few workers. The need to expand the program is the official stance of the California Farm Bureau Federation and the opinion of every farmer interviewed for this story.

President Bush has called for including a guest worker program in the immigration reform bills being devised by Congress, though there is none in a measure passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

"We need some form of guest worker program. We need Congress to document those workers," Phippen said. "What we've done is trap people here, in months when there is no work — because crossing the border is so dangerous."

Currently, the much more common immigrant status for noncitizens is called "legal permanent resident." That is what a green card represents.

Most field workers — because they carry Social Security cards and green cards — present themselves as under that category. But according to University of California agricultural survey statistics, only one-third of farm workers actually are permanent legal residents.

"What they need to work is a green card or Social Security card, or something that looks like a Social Security card," said social worker Wendy Taylor. Whether that Social Security card is real or bought or borrowed is another question, and farmers are not required to validate that they are real, said Taylor, a minister with United Church of Christ who works with farm laborers.

Bruce Blodgett, executive director of the San Joaquin Farm Bureau, said farmers are not required to validate the documents. "There's only so much they can do legally."

Blodgett said the Farm Bureau has been working with Feinstein and other legislators to get an agricultural guest worker program.

"We've been working on legislation for years — something that makes it more safe for them and a lot more productive for us," Blodgett said. "It's frustrating to us when we hear their stories of people dying in the desert. And we need workers. Shouldn't we have a better system?"

For the field worker, this game of pretending to be legal is fraught with problems that prohibit them from having anything like a normal life. They are constantly afraid of deportation. So they cannot apply for licenses, rent apartments or get health benefits. Workers interviewed at a gathering on Easter Sunday in Pescadero said, however, that the biggest thing they want is the right to cross the border without risking their lives.

Of 16 men — all here without their families to work in the vegetable and strawberry fields and flower nurseries — about a third said they hoped for a guest worker program, while the rest hoped for citizenship through amnesty.

The U.S. Senate is considering both options.

"The biggest thing is to be able to go home" on the off months, said Antonio, who has four children and a wife in Mexico. He said there is plenty of work here from June to December, but the other half of the year is spent waiting, and migrants survive on odd jobs and living in tight quarters.

Every other year, Antonio, who did not want his last name used for fear of getting deported, travels home, though it is becoming more dangerous to do so.

He said this past winter was the worst, involving three days of crossing the desert on foot. Not only was there the fear of being caught, he said, but also of surviving the desert, with its heat, tough terrain and animals such as snakes and scorpions. On top of that was the concern of being mistreated by vigilantes, muggers, border patrols and the "coyotes," or smugglers, to whom he paid $2,000 to get him across the border.

Antonio said several men in his border crossing group passed out in the desert and the coyote left them there.

Feinstein said her amendment "will provide the agriculture industry with a legal work force and offer agriculture workers a path to citizenship."

The full Senate has yet to pass legislation, and the Judiciary Committee's bill collapsed as it was brought to the full Senate. The Senate is expected to take it up again when it returns to session today.

Meanwhile, the House bill would make it a felony to be an undocumented worker and require employers to verify immigration status of their workers. This measure is not expected to get Senate support, which it would need to become law.

Farmers go back to the possibility of the United States becoming dependent on importing its food.

"The safety of food will be an issue," Burns added. "We have regulations on the types of pesticides and fertilizers we can use," as well as how food is transported and cleaned. Those regulations do not apply to imported food, Burns said.

Quaresma said, "The cost of production would go up and that would have to be reflected in food prices," explaining what would happen to prices if the current supply of farm workers was cut out. "I don't think most Americans know where their food comes from. They want quality, they want no pesticides, but they don't want to pay higher prices."

Between the 1940s and 1960s, U.S. immigration policy included a very large guest worker program called the Bracero program. It was instituted during World War II when there was a sudden shortage of male labor to tend fields and it was kept in place until the 1960s. Burns and Mucci, whose fathers and grandfathers were also farmers, have been around the business long enough to remember the Bracero program.

"It worked well," Burns said.

However, it petered out when a flow of seasonal workers started appearing without the U.S. government or employers going down to Mexico to recruit them.


Business Writer Barbara Grady can be reached at 208-6427 or bgrady@angnewspapers.com.

Between the ages of 14 and 18 I detassled corn every year. It was seasonal work. It was minimum wage stuff, but it was good for me!!

I hear it is the migrants who detassle now, but it used to be us kids and we were all happy to do it. Nothing like being 14 and having some spending money. Work only lasted 4 to 6 weeks. It was perfect!! It was tough for the first week every year, but you got used to it.