49 posts categorized "Inequality"

The new government of President Otto Perez Molina has initiated a program called “Hunger Zero” to combat chronic malnutrition in Guatemala.  Despite being a so-called Middle Income Country (a rung above the poorest countries, as measured by the size of the national economy), chronic malnutrition remains a persistent problem, with rates in certain areas as high as those in the poorest countries in Africa.

According to the head of the Food and Nutritional Security Secretariat (SESAN), Luis Enrique Monterroso, the project will begin in the hardest-hit municipalities and then expand to all 166 municipalities affected significantly by hunger. Included in the Hunger Zero program are nutrition interventions focused on the 1,000 Days "window of opportunity," from pregnancy until a child's second birthday. The government has also created the Dignity Triangle program, which focuses on food availability, access, and nutrition education.

Bread for the World is a strong supporter of the 1,000 Days Partnership and the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, which advocate for improved nutrition in pregnant women and children during this critical period. At this stage of life, the effects of malnutrition can cause irreversible damage to brain development, cognitive abilities, and resistance to diseases. Guatemala is also a supporter of these initiatives, which share key objectives with the new government’s anti-hunger programs.

The recently appointed head of SESAN happens to be a friend of Bread for the World! When Bread hosted the SUN Civil Society Working Group meeting that followed our 2011 National Gathering, Luis Enrique was there representing his country. His skills and commitment to ending hunger and malnutrition in Guatemala were evident to Otto Perez during his election campaign. He was asked to head this very important office, which is responsible for coordinating the efforts of 13 government ministries and reports directly to Guatemala's Vice President.

Todd Post, editor of Bread for the World Institute's Hunger Report, and I recently traveled to Guatemala and were able to meet with Luis Enrique in his new capacity. He is excited about the challenge before him and expressed his thanks for Bread for the World's support in giving him the opportunity to learn about SUN, which is just getting started in Guatemala.  He has already set an ambitious goal: reducing hunger by 10 percent within four years. He has also begun to work on Hunger Zero by identifying the 166 most malnourished of the country's 366 municipalities.

Guatemala is a country that faces many challenges – social, political, and economic. It is also a country that has correctly identified addressing the root causes of malnutrition as key to its future success.  Let’s follow the developments there and wish “our man in Guatemala” great success!

    Scott Bleggi is a senior international policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.

Net migration is the net total of migrants during the period, that is, the total number of immigrants less the annual number of emigrants, including both citizens and noncitizens. Source: World Bank

 The H-2A agricultural guest worker program, although dysfunctional, will probably grow. The beginnings of a framework exist that envisions the H-2A program as a way to benefit both growers in the United States and sending communities in Mexico.

An interactive data timeline on net migration accompanies this excerpt from the 2012 Hunger Report on the relationship between migration and development:

Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) works on guest worker recruitment, education, and training issues on the Mexican side of the border—but it doesn’t address the impact of the United States’ H-2A agricultural guest worker program on the Mexican communities that send these workers. In fact, this is one of the most under-analyzed parts of the H-2A program. It is rare for anyone, including the Mexican government, to raise the concerns of sending communities. The reasons Mexicans leave home to become farm workers in the United States are often not part of this or most other discussions of immigration reform.

But there are the beginnings of a framework that envisions the H-2A program as a way to benefit both growers in the United States and sending communities in Mexico. The bi-national Independent Agricultural Workers’ Center (CITA by its Spanish acronym) is pioneering such a model; it plans to integrate the H-2A program with Mexican rural development efforts. 

Farm worker advocate Chuck Barrett founded CITA along the Arizona-Mexico border in 2007 to serve as a “matchmaker” between prospective Mexican guest workers and U.S. growers. For the past several years, CITA has been focused on helping workers on both sides of the border: in Mexico with the recruitment process, and in the United States with disputes between workers and growers.

CITA helps growers recruit workers in Mexico and assists in getting growers’ H-2A applications—which Barrett says are notoriously onerous—through the Department of Labor and other agencies. It also provides services to Mexican guest workers, including financial literacy information, low-interest loans to pay for guest worker visas, psychological counseling, and education on the guest worker system. In addition to the fees it earns from growers, CITA is supported by organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

Barrett is hoping to expand the CITA model to become self-sustaining in rural communities throughout Mexico, saying that this expansion would help Mexican migrant-sending communities obtain “some beginning of control over migration, replacing illegal out-migration with legal migration.” According to this model, communities would be trained to facilitate worker recruitment, prescreen workers, and expedite the visa process—all tasks for which U.S. growers now pay CITA a fee. “Because they would be doing the training and passport process … they [Mexican rural areas] will get a portion to be used by the community to fulfill their own development objectives,” Barrett said. 

While Barrett—like almost everyone else—said that the H-2A program is dysfunctional, he also believes that its use will increase. “Whether people like it or not … H-2A is going to be a growing process,” he said. “Every version of AgJOBS includes an expansion of H-2A. I see the next couple of years as a window of opportunity to find alternatives … that are fairer for the workers and more effective for the employers, and also lend themselves … to connecting the migration process to the development process.”

CITA’s concept of connecting its H-2A employer services to rural development in migrant-sending Mexican rural communities is still on the drawing board. But based on the relationships they’ve forged through their outreach to growers and services to workers, Barrett and CITA executive director Janine Duron said that the program can be extended to the source of the immigrant farm worker issue—the poor Mexican communities that provide U.S. growers with both unauthorized and H-2A farm workers. “It’s an amazing relationship that can be built if you have reconciliation rather than adversity,” said Duron.

Reducing migration pressures will require development and job creation throughout Mexico, but poverty and migration are particularly concentrated in the countryside. Although about a quarter of all Mexicans live in rural areas, 60 percent of Mexico’s extremely poor people are rural, and 44 percent of Mexican immigrants come from rural communities. Immigration reform and development assistance need to be linked, particularly for rural Mexico.

After decades of declining support, agriculture and rural development is now re-emerging as a vital development focus. The World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development, states, “Agriculture continues to be a fundamental instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction.” Research has also found that agriculture is one of the best returns on investment in poverty-reduction spending. Each 1 percent increase in crop productivity in Asia reduces the number of poor people by half a percent. This correlation also holds for middle-income countries such as Mexico.

+ Read more from the 2012 Hunger Report on the issue of Farm Workers and Immigration.

Kate Hagen is Hunger Report project assistant at Bread for the World Institute.

Migrant workers rest after picking cucumbers in Blackwater, Virginia. Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl.

2011 was a record year for U.S. farmers, with farm income topping $100 billion. This includes sales of $22 billion in fruits and nuts and $21 billion in vegetables and melons – crops that rely on immigrant farm labor.

But even as U.S. farmers prospered in 2011, those working on farms had less to celebrate.

The nation’s agricultural mecca – Fresno Country, California – had the state’s highest agricultural sales ($5.9 billion) and its highest poverty rate – 27 percent. More than 36 percent of the county’s children were poor, also the highest rate in the state. As one agricultural expert puts it, “High farm sales and high poverty rates often go together.”

Low wages, the seasonal nature of agricultural work, and, for many, unauthorized immigration status make it difficult for farm workers and their families to escape poverty. Farm workers’ high poverty rates aren’t totally attributable to immigration status, but it’s certainly one of the causes: 71 percent of all hired farm workers in the United States are immigrants, and about half of them are in the country illegally.

Poverty among farm worker families has decreased greatly since the mid-1990s, when more than half of all farm worker families were poor. Today 23 percent of farm workers nationally live below the poverty line.

Although many farm worker families have escaped poverty, their wages have increased slowly. Between 1989 and 2009 the value of U.S. agricultural exports rose 250 percent while average hourly farm worker wages increased 18 percent ($1.52) from $8.55 to $10.07. 

In addition to not adequately sharing in the profits of agriculture, farm workers face increased threats on other fronts.

In October 2011, the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced its highest-ever number of removals: 396,906 for fiscal year 2011.

About 55 percent of all individuals removed had been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors. Although most of us can agree that all unauthorized immigrants convicted of serious crimes should be removed from the United States, removing those who are guilty of petty traffic violations, or have no criminal history at all, damages families and doesn’t serve the country.

Of ICE’s almost 400,000 removals for FY 2011, only 6,967  – or about 2 percent – were deported for crimes such as homicide or sexual assault.  

For the 45 percent of deportees with no criminal record, they were guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are no easy answers to the predicament of many immigrant farm worker families. But any solution should include some sort of legalization.

Immigrant farm workers need assurance that an I-9 audit won’t destroy their livelihoods and legalization would facilitate immigrants’ deeper integration into rural communities, since they could then invest in their new homes and neighborhoods.

Legalization wouldn’t completely solve the problem of poverty among immigrant farm workers, but it would be a step in the right direction.  

Andrew Wainer is Immigration Policy Analyst at Bread for the World Institute. To learn more about farm workers, read Bread for the World’s 2012 Hunger Report and Bread for the World Institute’s briefing paper on farm workers.  

Former presidents John Agyekum Kufuor and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have been selected to jointly receive the 2011 World Food Prize for their personal commitment and visionary leadership while serving as the presidents of Ghana and Brazil, respectively. Their exemplary leadership demonstrates the crucial role of effective policies, proper institutional foundations, and partnerships in driving development progress.

Under President Kufuor's leadership, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to meet Millennium Development Goal 1 – by cutting in half both the proportion of its people suffering from hunger and the proportion living on less than $1 a day. Ghana saw a reduction in its poverty rate from 51.7 percent in 1991 to 26.5 percent in 2008, while hunger decreased from 34 percent in 1990 to 9 percent in 2004.

President Kufuor’s economic reforms, including the Food and Agriculture Sector Development Policy, provided incentives and strengthened public investments in the agriculture and food sector — the backbone of Ghana’s economy — which grew at a rate of 5.5 percent between 2003 and 2008. Growth in the agricultural sector drove expansion in the national economy, with GDP quadrupling by 2008.

Under President Kufuor, the Agricultural Extension Service was reactivated and special attention paid to educating farmers on best practices. As a result, Ghana’s cocoa production doubled between 2002 and 2005. Production of food crops such as maize, cassava, yams, and plantains, as well as livestock production, also increased significantly.

The Ghana School Feeding Program launched by President Kufuor provided one nutritious locally produced meal a day for school children in kindergarten to junior high school (ages 4 through 14). By ensuring nutritious food at school, the program dramatically reduced the level of chronic hunger and malnutrition while improving school attendance. By the end of 2010, more than 1 million primary school children were participating and benefiting from this program.

Photo: Office of former President John Kufuor

Ghana’s political stability, economic reforms, agricultural development, and significant reduction of hunger and poverty led to an award of $547 million from the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation in 2006. The Kufuor government applied the entire grant toward modernizing agriculture for rural development, increasing the production and productivity of high-value cash and food staple crops, and raising farmers' incomes.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a commitment that fighting hunger and poverty would be a top priority of his government. He called upon all elements of Brazilian society to embrace his goals of ensuring three meals a day for all citizens, alleviating poverty, enhancing educational opportunities for children, and achieving greater inclusion of poor people in society.

President Lula da Silva’s national initiatives — embodied in his Zero Hunger strategy — were well aligned with the Millennium Development Goals. During his tenure, MDG 1 was exceeded before the 2015 deadline, as Brazil reduced by half its proportion of hungry people and also reduced the percentage of Brazilians living in extreme poverty from 12 percent in 2003 to 4.8 percent in 2009.

More than 10 government ministries were focused on the expansive Zero Hunger programs, which provided greater access to food, strengthened family farms and rural incomes, and increased school enrollment among children of primary school age. President Lula da Silva encouraged state and municipal governments to work together with civil society and the private sector--a strategy that was central to the rapid and significant decrease in the levels of poverty and hunger across the country.

Zero Hunger quickly became one of the most successful food and nutritional security policies in the world through its broad network of programs, including the Bolsa Familia Program, the Food Purchase Program, and the School Feeding Program.

Photo: Amy Margolies, Congressional Hunger Center

The Bolsa Familia Program, set up to provide cash aid to poor families, has been a major contributor to the reduction of poverty. Another important pillar of Zero Hunger was the Food Purchase Program, which linked local production directly with expanding food consumption and contributed to rural development by acquiring food directly from smallholder farmers. Distribution of food to poor families was through public schools, community restaurants, assisted living facilities, daycare centers, and related organizations. 

The national School Feeding Program has had a far-reaching impact on reducing child malnutrition by providing nutritious meals to children in all grades of Brazilian public schools. In 2010, 47 million students were being served and a minimum of 30 percent of the food was being supplied by local farms. Child malnutrition fell 61.9 percent between 2003 and 2009, and all age groups improved their access to quality food.

We can end hunger and poverty in our time!

Today the Annie E. Casey Foundation released its annual Kids Count Data Book. The newest edition of the most comprehensive resource available on the state of the nation’s children tells a sad story of the recession’s effects on children in our country.

Some striking examples from the data:

• Nearly 8 million children have at least one parent who is unemployed--double the number of 2007.
• There are 7.7 million children with no health insurance, along with 12 million parents.
• Since 2007, 5.3 million children have been affected by foreclosure.
• In 2005, 29 percent of families with children were considered “asset poor,” meaning that their total assets (liquid and non-liquid) added up to less than three months of poverty-level income. By 2009, the percentage of families with children who were asset poor had jumped to 37 percent.

These data are in line with trends from the past decade that show widening levels of inequality. Before the recession, low-income households were not benefiting from economic growth as middle- and high-income families were.  “The official child poverty rate,” the Casey Foundation reports, “which is a conservative measure of economic hardship, increased 18 percent between 2000 and 2009, essentially returning to the same level as the early 1990s.”

There were, however, improvements in five indicators of child well-being: the infant mortality rate, child death rate, teen death rate, teen birth rate, and percentage of teens who are neither in school nor high school graduates.

The Casey Foundation recommends six ways for policymakers to support struggling families:

• Strengthen and modernize unemployment insurance and promote foreclosure prevention and remediation efforts.
• Preserve and strengthen existing programs that supplement poverty-level wages, offset the high cost of child care, and provide health insurance coverage for parents and children.
• Promote savings and asset protection and help families gain financial knowledge skills.
• Promote responsible parenthood and ensure that mothers-to-be receive prenatal care.
• Ensure that children are developmentally ready to succeed in school.
• Promote reading proficiency by the end of third grade.

The new edition of the Data Book is supported by an interactive website that enables users to search the national and state-level data collected in the book. 

 
A farm worker picks cherry tomatoes on David Mann Farm in Fort Blackmore, Virginia, near the southwest border with Tennessee, on July 2011.  Photo credit: Laura Elizabeth Pohl

“In times of economic downturn, like our country now faces, we begin to fear that which we do not know. And many choose to point the blame for our economic problems on immigrants,” said David Roefaro, mayor of Utica, NY, at last month’s hearing, “The Economic Imperative for Enacting Immigration Reform.” before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and Border Security.

The United States in the 21^st century is clearly not the first, and is unlikely to be the last, society to blame outsiders for its economic problems. What’s important is that we identify the facts of the situation and ensure that they are considered when it comes time to establish policies.

 Despite the controversy surrounding nearly every aspect of U.S. immigration policy, the three witnesses at the hearing—mayors from New York, Georgia, and Maine—identified at least one area of consensus: every day, immigrants are making economic, social, and cultural contributions to the United States.

 Farm workers’ contributions, for example, begin with the work that they do to supply food for our tables. The rest of the economy benefits as crops are harvested by “skilled migrant farm laborers who have harvesting down to a fine art,” as Mayor Paul Bridges of Uvalda, GA, put it. Bridges said the direct contribution of agricultural workers to Georgia’s economy is $6.85 billion.

The direct contribution, though, is augmented by the taxes immigrants pay in their role as consumers. In Georgia and in every other state, immigrants pay the same amount of sales tax on every purchase as other customers, thus helping to pay for schools, transportation, and other public services. Other contributions to the state economy come from rent, mortgage payments, and property taxes.

Immigrants make a net contribution to the national economy as well, since they pay federal taxes and support Social Security, contributing up to $7 billion a year. Unauthorized as well as authorized immigrants pay into Social Security, even though the former will never receive a single monthly check.

In North Carolina, immigrants contribute more than $9 billion to the economy. Communities with a declining tax base that are having trouble surviving can get a badly-needed influx of vitality when immigrants arrive and start new businesses, buy homes, pay local taxes, and purchase consumer goods from local and regional markets. Immigrants also can enhance a city’s culture since they diversify activities and organize events that promote civic engagement.

Although these contributions should be evident, the position of immigrants is increasingly threatened by the enactment of anti-immigrant legislation at both state and federal levels. Some states have passed harsh anti-immigrant laws with far-reaching repercussions. Bridges, who has been an educator and farmer in his part of Georgia, spoke up at the hearing about the problems caused in more than one area of the economy and community by laws such as H.B. 87 (which, among other provisions, allows the police to check the immigration status of anyone suspected of a crime and requires businesses to use an electronic verification system before hiring workers).

One problem is that local law enforcement agencies are forced to use their scarce resources to implement the new laws. Often, police officers are not trained for these duties, which in any case take them away from their chief responsibility of protecting the community from crime. The new laws also contribute to a climate of fear for immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized.

The repercussions of anti-immigrant legislation such as that passed in Georgia are felt throughout the state as well as at the community level.  Immigrants have been driven out to more welcoming states; reportedly, this created labor shortages in Georgia of as many as 11,000 workers.

Shortages of farm workers can also lead to a domino effect:  crops worth millions of dollars are left to rot in the fields. Not being able to harvest and sell all their crops creates hardships for farm operators and their families and puts them at greater risk of defaulting on business and personal loans. Consumers, in turn, have to pay more for produce since it’s in shorter supply; for low-income families in particular, this often means less nutritious meals (since grocery budgets generally don’t increase just because food prices have). This carries consequences for productivity, both for individuals and the economy as a whole.

Georgia is just an example of what is happening as states try to fix the immigration system. Lifting up the economic and other contributions of immigrants, which are often left out of the immigration debate altogether, will be key to finding humane, fair, and practical solutions for the broken U.S. immigration system.

Note: Bread for the World has not taken a legislative position on the issue/issues covered in this blog post.

Photo by Dorothea Lange from the Library of Congress

When John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, a reporter asked him if he thought he deserved the world’s most prestigious award for novelists. Reportedly, Steinbeck said, “Frankly, no.”

Sadly for Steinbeck, this opinion was shared by many literary critics who thought that while he was a competent writer, he wasn’t worthy of the Nobel. Although he was a prolific writer, Steinbeck’s literary reputation rested primarily on one work that remains undisputed in terms of its contribution to American culture.

When The Grapes of Wrath was released in 1939, it caused a sensation that literature is probably no longer capable of provoking. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was the best-selling novel of the year. Just months later, in 1940, the book was turned into a film by John Ford that was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

For readers today, Steinbeck’s migration saga remains relevant as a piece of (dramatized) social analysis. It’s essentially a road novel about the Joads, a poor Midwestern migrant farming family. Throughout the novel, the Joads fight to keep their family intact while fleeing the 1930s Oklahoma Dustbowl for the hope of farm work in California.

But once the Joads begin to migrate, the family begins to disintegrate.

The Joad grandparents aren’t able to cope with life outside their native Oklahoma, and they both die early in the novel. A brother-in-law gets fed up with scraping by on itinerant farm work, so he leaves the family – and his pregnant wife – to seek other opportunities. The main character, oldest son Tom Joad, gets tangled in a labor dispute and is forced to abandon the family and live in hiding.

The disintegration of the Joad family illustrates that — although we are all subject to pressures and influences that bring us together and push us apart —migrants face unique and strong centrifugal forces that work against family unity.

It’s common to meet young men laboring on farms in the United States who haven’t been home in years. They keep sending their family money saved from their $9-an-hour wages, but there’s no human contact.

Even families that reconstitute themselves on the U.S. side of the border are not secure. The Urban Institute estimates that 100,000 immigrant parents of U.S. citizen children have been deported to Mexico over the past 10 years.

Maria Santiago’s family of farm workers — whom Bread for the World met with in March 2011— is an example of how the immigration system can harm families. In 2010, Maria’s husband went to Ohio to plant tomatoes. Normally she would accompany her husband north from their Florida home, but this time, since she was pregnant, Maria, 34, decided to stay behind.    

Traveling by bus on his way back to Florida, Maria’s husband was stopped by immigration officials and deported. Now he’s in Mexico working to raise the money to return to the United States, but it’s difficult for a laborer in Mexico without a formal education or marketable skills to obtain the money necessary to return.

Maria thinks about going back to Mexico. But for her U.S.-born children, Mexico is an unknown and unappealing destination. They’re American.

In spite of Maria’s story and thousands of similar stories, deportation probably impacts fewer families than the more gradual and less dramatic impact of an increasingly dangerous border.  

Ernesto Alvarado, 40, has been doing farm work in the United States for 20 years, mostly in the American South. Although his parents live in the Mexican border state of Nuevo León it has become too dangerous to cross back-and-forth with any frequency.

“If I go over there I can’t come back,” Alvarado said during a June 2011 interview in south Georgia. “I don’t care about the money, but you can die on that trip.”

Just as Steinbeck’s poor Midwestern Scotch-Irish migrant farmers faced the Great Depression while struggling against Californians hostile to poor outsiders, today’s immigrant farm workers also contend with fallout from the Great Recession compounded by escalated immigration enforcement and an increasingly violent border.

A large portion of Americans believe we have 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States because we're lazy.

According to this line of thinking, if we turned up the heat by reducing public benefits, some of the 13.5 million unemployed citizens would be compelled to turn off the TV, get off the couch, and apply for jobs working as field hands, cleaning staff, and construction workers.

This theory has a clean, mathematical appeal: Subtract an unauthorized worker and add an unemployed citizen equals fewer immigrants and higher citizen employment. Simple.

But the labor market isn’t so simple.  Unless we want to transition to a command economy where the government compels workers into certain jobs, we can’t force citizen workers to labor in agriculture, which is dominated by immigrants and has been for decades.

As I noted in a previous post, there have been numerous attempts to entice citizens to field work at wages above state and federal minimums. All have been unsuccessful. Even with the worst recession in decades and the Department of Labor trying to increase awareness of agricultural job vacancies among citizens, there have been very few takers.

Almost all serious observers and analysts agree that at least some of the work immigrants do in the United States—particularly agricultural—is never again going to be done by citizen workers. Barring an event of apocalyptic scale, U.S. citizens are not going to return to work in the fields in large numbers.

This trend is true around the world in developed and developing countries. If Americans are lazy, they’re in good company. Immigrants from relatively poorer countries perform agricultural work in economies as diverse as Canada, Japan, and El Salvador.

In Central America, El Salvador—which is a major source of migrants to the United States—employs 200,000 unauthorized immigrant workers from poorer neighboring countries such as Nicaragua and Honduras to work in agriculture because Salvadorans—who tend to be a bit wealthier than their neighbors—have started to abandon field labor.

Closer to home, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) brings about 20,000 workers from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean each year to work in seasonal fruit and vegetable crops, some of which are exported to the United States. SAWP is run by the Canadian and Mexican governments and is seen by both as a model guest worker program.

Our abandonment of agricultural work is consistent with what happens around the world when societies become more educated and prosperous. Educated parents want their children to go to college, not work in the fields.

Since ramping up recruitment has failed to entice citizens to do agricultural work, other efforts have emphasized increasing wages. While moderate wage increases will help stabilize the current farm labor work force and lift many workers out of poverty, raising them to draw in citizen workers isn't a realistic solution according to leading agricultural economists.

That's because —in part—it isn't all about wages. While Mexico is an industrializing country, about a quarter of its population is still rural — millions of these rural Mexicans end up working in rural America.  

In the United States about 2 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. We've essentially lost our taste for agricultural work at any realistic wage.

“The flexibility of low-wage labor markets … is always on the demand side, not the supply side,” University of California-Davis Professor Philip Martin said during a recent phone interview. “It’s much easier to reduce demand than to increase supply. If wages go up, we are going to hire fewer people,” Martin continues. “We’re not going to get more Americans out there.”

The same holds for an immigration crackdown that removes immigrant workers with the goal of creating space for citizens. Martin says a lack of immigrant workers due to an enforcement crackdown will prompt farmers to adopt one or several options:

1)      Increase mechanization

2)      Switch crops

3)      Sell their land

4)      Increase the cost of their products

“Hire more citizen workers” is not on the list and isn’t an economically realistic outcome of deporting immigrant workers.

Over the long term, the need for immigrants could gradually decrease as growers shift to labor-saving aides and mechanization. But immigrants will be central to the farm labor force at least for the next 20 years. Even beyond that, agriculture will continue to require some form of human labor.

Economics dictates that immigrants will be the farm labor force for the foreseeable future. Rather than harboring fantasies about middle-class Americans returning to the fields, we would be well-served by crafting a realistic agricultural labor policy that benefits workers, growers, and migrant-sending communities in Latin America.

Photo credit: racialjustice

A Mexican migrant worker harvests Cabarnet Franc grapes at Lovingston Winery in Nelson County, Va.

My first job out of college was at Starbucks, probably in part because I was a political science major. In Santa Barbara in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much opportunity—at least that I could find—for someone interested in international relations. As a result, my first job was as a barista that paid a bit above minimum wage. Many of my friends were in the same situation, working as waiters, cooks, and bartenders.

None of us worked in agriculture.

Although I lived in the nation’s largest producer of fruits and vegetables—California—and Santa Barbara county was a major agricultural producer, it never occurred to me to work picking strawberries or broccoli. Only part of this was due to money.

Seasonal crop work wages vary from terrible to decent. Some workers earn below the hourly minimum wage and others earn $12 per hour and beyond. In 2007 the average hourly earnings for crop workers was between $8.65 and $9.35, but because field laborers work two-thirds as many hours as full-time workers, their average annual earnings are about $11,000—right at the poverty line and about one-third of the $35,000 average for nonfarm production workers.

In addition to wages, work benefits for crop workers are meager. Even as a part-time employee at Starbucks, I had access to health insurance. Most crop workers receive no employment-related benefits and do not have health insurance or retirement plans. Farm workers are exempt from most minimum wage and hour guarantees found in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and they are not entitled to overtime pay or mandatory breaks.

Working conditions, not wages and benefits, are a major deterrent to considering agricultural work. Even if you’re lucky enough to find a field work job that pays decently and if you’re a skilled enough worker to earn above the minimum wage, you’ll be laboring in conditions most of us wouldn’t tolerate.

In the worst cases, farm workers are subjected to slave-like conditions. Since 1997—in Florida alone—there have been seven federal slavery convictions related to farm workers, involving more than 1,100 laborers. Most have involved immigrant workers from Haiti and Latin America.

It’s important not to exaggerate the conditions farm workers face. Most don’t work in bondage, but as a 2008 U.S. State Department report on human trafficking asserts, “Migrant labor camps are particularly common settings for labor exploitation and trafficking within the United States.” The report adds, “Poor working and living conditions on farms that employ migrant or seasonal labor are endemic to the U.S. farm industry.”

In a nutshell, field work—as necessary as it is to our sustenance—is demanding at best and dangerous at worst. And that’s why those who don’t have other labor options—specifically recent unauthorized immigrants who don’t speak English, have less than a high school education, and whose immigration status limits their labor mobility—end up doing the work. There have been attempts to entice citizens into agricultural work. They’ve all failed.

The most recent (and famous) effort is the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) “Take Our Jobs” campaign. This campaign, which included a congressional hearing appearance by Stephen Colbert, sought to hire citizens and legal residents to work at farm jobs typically filled by unauthorized workers.

Despite a 9.5 percent unemployment rate and 14.6 million people out of work, the UFW reported that only a handful of people signed up for the farm worker jobs. While this campaign was at least partly a UFW communications and advocacy strategy, serious efforts by state governments have also failed to draw citizens to field work even during times of high unemployment.

During the late 1990s, after Congress passed welfare reform, California Sen. Diane Feinstein insisted on creating a program to place the state’s unemployed into farm jobs in the Central Valley. State and county workforce agencies and grower associations identified the agricultural zones toward which to channel the state’s unemployed, but only a handful of workers were successfully recruited.

In 2006, the Washington state apple industry launched a field worker recruitment campaign in response to a harvest worker shortage. State and county agencies set up advertising, recruitment, and training programs for 1,700 worker vacancies. Ultimately only about 40 were successfully placed.

Manuel Cunha, the leader of a grower organization in California who was involved in the California program in the 1990s, said it wasn’t wages that dissuaded unemployed citizens from taking the farm jobs. “The biggest thing was that it was too hard of work,” Cunha said.

"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God …" – Thomas Jefferson

When the first U.S. Census was carried out in 1790, 90 percent of the country’s 4 million residents were farmers or farmworkers. As the nation’s oldest business, everyone from presidents to slaves were intimate with farm life and agricultural production.

But in less than a century, the United States was on its way to becoming an industrial power and an urbanized nation. Today, less than 2 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. While we may still possess folkloric visions about farms and enjoy the bounty of agrarian life, most of us don’t want to participate in it.

The country was founded on the ideal of the family farm, but the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the late 19^th century meant that family-based farm labor couldn’t meet the needs of growing agricultural operations seeking to supply larger portions of the population. Increasingly driven by technological change and growing national and international markets in the 20^th century, farms grew and became mechanized as machines replaced animals (and later, people).

This part we know.

What is less understood is that while farms became mechanized during the 20^th century, the agricultural labor force was also becoming largely foreign-born, as native-born agricultural laborers moved to towns and cities for more and better job options.

At least as early as the 1880s, seasonal farm jobs were losing their appeal for Americans. When the native-born drew away from agriculture, immigrants filled the gap. On the West Coast, they came from Asia.

Late 19^th-century agricultural labor in the West was dominated by the Chinese. After losing their jobs constructing the transcontinental railroad after it was completed in 1869, the Chinese were shut out of jobs in the cities. They eventually found work in California’s agricultural industry; by the 1880s, up to 80 percent of all California farmworkers were Chinese. After Chinese immigration was banned in 1882, other Asian immigrant groups worked on West Coast farms to fulfill the growing national demand for fruit—Japanese, Filipino, Indians, and Pakistanis being among the most common.

After the Civil War, African-American sharecroppers and poor whites along the East Coast were joined by influxes of European immigrants contracted by employment agencies to meet growing farm labor demand. By the early 20^th century, African-Americans were the majority of migrant farmworkers along the East Coast. But the two World Wars would accelerate America’s reliance on immigrant Mexican farmworkers throughout the country.

While Mexicans were involved in agriculture in the West since at least the late 19^th century, World War I increased the country’s food demand and prompted a shortage of agricultural laborers. Now largely lost to history, Mexicans were recruited by the United States to work in agriculture—first during World War I and on a larger scale during World War II through the Bracero Program.

As whites and African-Americans gradually moved out of agricultural work after World War II, native-born Hispanics and Mexican immigrants—both authorized and unauthorized—became the labor force for rural America on both coasts and in the Midwest.

Today, Spanish is the de facto language of the agricultural labor force, with 84 percent of farmworkers claiming this as their native tongue. In 2010, experts estimated that 75 percent of workers on crop farms were immigrants—mostly from Mexico and Central America—and two-thirds were unauthorized. This estimate may be low. Many growers state that up to 90 percent of their workforce is unauthorized.

Agricultural labor in America is now largely in the hands of Latin Americans and Caribbean islanders, both legal residents and—more commonly—unauthorized immigrants. If your food wasn’t harvested by a machine, it was probably produced by immigrants—most of them living in the country without authorization and in poverty.

According to a 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture report, farmworkers, “while critical to many agricultural sectors … remain among the most economically disadvantaged working groups in the United States.” The same study found that weekly median earnings of crop farmworkers were lower than maids, construction workers, security guards, and janitors. Only dishwashers were found to have lower weekly earnings.

The nation’s primary food producers are also among the most food insecure. One study in North Carolina found that food insecurity among Latino farmworkers was four times higher than the general U.S. population. Specifically, 47 percent of Latino farmworker households in the study were classified as food insecure and 5 percent were found to be suffering from severe hunger.

While Jefferson envisioned an almost sacred role for farmers, today the workforce that harvests the food we eat is under increasing economic and immigration enforcement pressure from a country that does not want immigrants working the fields, but which long ago lost interest in agrarian life.