The Day Without Farm Workers

I spent my junior high years in Oregon. When I was there many of the fruits and vegetables were picked by school kids off for the summer, including me. I also delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, worked as a laborer in construction, and a number of other jobs our elites, in their cloistered little world, think that Americans simply won't do.

Today I own and operate a ranch of my own. While I could certainly use some cheap help, I don't employ illegals to work for me. I lose respect for my fellow farmers who tell me respect for the rule of law is optional.

I'd like to offer Mr. Masumoto a suggestion: If the endless supply of illegal immigration is in fact shut off or sharply curtailed, you won't be at a disadvantage. Yes, employing school kids and other Americans may make labor costs go up. But since the farmer's share of the average consumer's food dollar is very small, even a relatively large increase in labor costs will translate into minor increases for consumers. I have no sympathy for you, Mr. Masumoto.

I do have sympathy for American workers. The American worker had a very rough time in the seventies through the nineties. Texas filled up with rust belt refugees. NAFTA and other shabby offshoring schemes were implemented, making things even worse. Instead of whining and complaining that they just couldn't make it, most of these workers buckled down and did what they had to. And the closest thing to sympathy these American workers received from the elites was a condescending message that you'll just have to learn to adjust to the new workplace realities. Why shouldn't employers have to adjust to new workplace realities as well?

Please don't suggest that hard work is some sort of subversive activity unfit for Americans. And I have no sympathy for aliens who flaunt my country's laws; my sympathy is reserved for my fellow citizens who work hard and play by the rules. It's a shame you feel otherwise.

I've written fairly extensively on the topic of immigration here.

I really think the left is going to need to consider the range of available options and possibilities here to have any real credibility.

Tell ya what. Let's pay all fruit-pickers 15 bucks an hour. I bet you'll see legal citizens lining up for those jobs.

I'm a white guy, and I've been in jobs that paid less than 8 that were back breaking. I still "bend over" every day. I'm offended by the notion that I am not willing to do that sort of work. I'm also offended by the notion that brown people are the ones that should be doing menial labor. People shouldn't be going to other countries, especially wealthier ones, to do work that the native-born people supposedly are too good to do. All that does is create an underclass. I don't want anyone coming here to be an underclass.

End NAFTA and GATT. Cancel third world debt. Institute a living wage and go after employers that hire illegal immigrants. Let's overthrow our oligarchy here and encourage Mexicans to go back and overthrow theirs. We're all getting the shaft here.

"Souixrose: Guess you have no idea what NAFTA has done to the population of Mexico’s indigenous farmers that they make the “choice” to come to the US and suffer the often inhumane consequences?"

I've personaly worked along side illegal aliens (in Chicago construction jobs). They weren't bad people-but America was just a job for them. I well understand what NAFTA did to them-having lived through the midwestern farm crisis-which I would suggest was made worse because a lot of American farmers in the West had access to a cheap labor force that was largely paid in green cards rather than the farmers cash.

My memories of the Midwest farm crisis include growing up on a rural road where all but two famiies went through bankruptcies or forclosure. I saw close family friends literally work themselves to death in a futile effort to stay afloat.

We need an immigration solution here that is fair to Mexicans-and doesnt hurt working Americans. The rich that have supported illegal immigration can clean up the mess they have made-even it if takes every penny the rich have If we need to spend a few hundred Billion to solve mexico's underlying problem, so be it--and we can finance that with collection of immigration fines and taxation ofthe assets of the rich.

“For those of you who feel that there is something different about an undocumented worker, here is the difference. They have a higher employment rate and a lower incarceration rate than citizens. In relation to what they take out of society, their taxes more than cover it because they pay SS and Medicare but get no benefit from them, and they pay school (property) taxes the same as everyone else, directly or indirectly. They don’t get refunds from their income tax withholding the way other people do, so in general, people who complain about them are parasitizing them twice, once from their underpaid work and once from their taxes.”

Incarceration rate is very different than rate of crimnnality. Extradition from Mexico isn't nearly as easy as extradition from another state. That is why here in Portland, virtually all heroin street dealers are Mexicans-if they get into trouble with the law, they can jsut go back home. In fact if they commit any crime that theoretically carries the death penalty, Mexico will not extradite them at all.

Government services other than defense and education in the US cost about $10K per adult citzen. You need to ask yourself if the immigrants that a specific policy is selecting really generate that kind of surplus that is available for taxation. I personally support generous transfer payments to those Americans in need(and have no illusion that we don't already have substantial transfers). However, most of the world doesn't do that-and if we want to have a highly developed and egalitarian economy, we must be prepared to have a realistic immigration policy-and expanding entitlement programs they way many of us want would make immigration realism even more urgent.

I live in the Pacific Northwest and have actually met a a liberal arts graduate of Wesleyan University that was working picking organic produce in this area. Her comment was that she was doing about as well as her friends that were working in nightclubs. She was hoping to eventually find another line of work--but the simple fact is that there really no line of work in the US in which most workers aren't Americans. There are specific areas in which the economy has become dependent on illegal immigration because of the collective willingness of owners to systematically violate US law.

Why shouldn't the property of those that have profitted from illegal immigration be conficated to solve the problems they have helped create? I think we could use modest economic incentives to reverse the flow of Mexican citizens from the US to Mexico. It would cost money-but the rich criminals that have profitted from illegal immigration can afford it. Just enforcing the existing laws would yield at least $300 Billion. That could seriously improve life for the poor in Mexico, Central America and the Carribean-and transform the infrastructure there. Care would have to be taken to keep it out of the hands of the wealthy predators that now run Mexico-but those thugs can be dealt with.

I'm a white American (this is relevent in minute), and I was looking through my mom's old photo-album. I came across a picture of her in her 20s during the late 1950s on a ladder picking apples. I asked, "what's this mom?"

She replied that she had a summer job in college picking apples. See, if we clamped down on immigration, the apples would still get picked. And BTW, can you imagine a college co-ed picking apples today?

NAFTA does suck bad. That's why I voted for Ross the Boss Perot back in 1992. But we little people didn't vote for NAFTA, and our choice of a president was thwarted with dirty tricks and threats by the Bush mafia.

I became a part time organic farmer myself. I farm my own half acre, and I help a "real farmer" with a half acre of vegetables on his real "tractor and barn" farm. My family and the farmer's family will stock up for the year, and we plan to sell the pretty nice surplus at farmers' markets. I have two other friends who are cultivating a half acre each, for basically the same reasons -- we don't like the Mexican invasion, and at the same time we do feel bad for the Mexican farmers being put out of business.

So you could say it's 50% racism, and 50% solidarity with Mexicans IN MEXICO where they belong.

At the same time, what a great decision it was to take up mini-farming! I remember my original battle cry was "I'll pick my own damned lettuce!" And then I realized I don't even like lettuce. I grow kale, mustard, spinach, chard, kohlrabi, wakefield cabbage. I'll never touch lettuce again! We got a chest freezer and a dehydrator and a pressure canner too, to put up foods for the winter. The hell with agribusiness!

I like the above poster's idea about "enlisting to be a farmer," though hopefully the "farming army" would be a free enterprise solution and not "agricultural collectivization" like the Soviet Union experiment. Agricultrual labor is wonderful and sometimes even "fun" when you do it for yourself, but HELL ON EARTH if you do it for a boss.

clan-keith: Guess you have no idea what NAFTA has done to the population of Mexico's indigenous farmers that they make the "choice" to come to the US and suffer the often inhumane consequences?

"For those of you who feel that there is something different about an undocumented worker, here is the difference. They have a higher employment rate and a lower incarceration rate than citizens. In relation to what they take out of society, their taxes more than cover it because they pay SS and Medicare but get no benefit from them, and they pay school (property) taxes the same as everyone else, directly or indirectly. They don’t get refunds from their income tax withholding the way other people do, so in general, people who complain about them are parasitizing them twice, once from their underpaid work and once from their taxes."

What you leave out of your argument is the fact that these are the conditions under which illegal immigrants have CHOSEN to live. If American companies were crossing into Mexico, rounding up poor folks and dragging them against their will into our country to work for substandard pay and in terrible working conditions, I would be the first to raise my voice against the injustice and unfairness of it all. Instead, illegal immigrants have CHOSEN to bypass our established, legal paths to citizenship, which would ensure that their rights were protected and would entitle them to the protections against exploitation our laws provide to American citizens.

I have no sympathy for the American businesses who exploit illegal immigrants. Nor do I have sympathy for folks who CHOOSE to cross our borders illegally and then demand the same rights and benefits as those who played by the rules and earned their way to American citizenship. Legal immigrants are a vital and welcome addition to our society, having demonstrated their willingness to be good citizens by following our laws. Illegal immigrants knowingly CHOSE to break our laws. It should be no wonder, then, that Americans greet the argument that illegal immigrants are actually good citizens with a great deal of skepticism. A demonstrated willingness to break our laws does nothing to support this argument, and the idea of rewarding lawbreakers is fundamentally repugnant.

"Minimum wage on a farm beats minimum wage in Mexico any day."

Dear Christ is...,

I have heard that sentiment expressed in various ways over the years as a justification for paying substandard wages to immigrant labor.

A Mexican coworker encountered the idea so often that he repeated it himself. I think he was caught short when I told him that the wage that we received would be great if we were able to return to his country every night, but that in this country it didn't pay the bills.

One cannot justify low wages to immigrant labor by indicating that it would be more than the wage made in the country of origin. If the wage paid does not cover the cost of living while working in a particular country then it is exploitation.

Exploitation cannot be justified. We need to counter untruths with truth whenever they appear.

Terran

I grew up on a farm in rural Missouri. I've actually done a lot of farm work.

When Masumoto says"
"Without passage of immigration reform, I can’t get enough help to harvest my fruit" He's saying something like: under existing economic conditions, my farm is only profitable because of the availability of immigrant labor. The thing is, this is a race to the bottom. The increased availability of immigrant labor only increased profit margins briefly. Once illegal immigrants get their green cards, their interest injobs like those Mr. Masumoto can offer decrease rapidly. What those folks are really working for isn't their meager wages-but a shot at a valuable US green card.

Businesses that rely on illegal immigration depend on other tax payers to pay for education, healthcare, infrastructure and the costs of crime associated with the workers they bring into the US.

Even if employers like Masumoto are forced to either pay a living wage or go out of business, the price American comsumers pay will increase only a small amount. Less than $.10 of every dollar you pay at the grocery store actually goes to farmers.

If illegal immigration is taken seriously, we'll see more smaller and owner operated farms. The larger farms will simply have to be sold to pay for things like immigration fines. Those fines will have to be substantial-and enforced-to be effective. If they aren't, farmers like Masumoto will be forced to use illegal alien labor to stay in business-just like Virginia planters were once forced either use African slaves or get out that business. I think history has shown that slavery was a huge moral and economic mistake in the long term-and history will show recent immigration practices are a similarly horrible mistake.

We paid our Hispanic rock pickers over $8/hr last year. MOST were American citizens. I'd guess our wages were a bit higher than average in our area (S MN). Rock picking is hard work, but not bad if you're in good shape.

Farming is such backbreaking work for such a small amount of financial gain (not to mention the zero opportunity for advancement,) that the economically desperate choose THE MILITARY before the hoe, even when we're losing 5-10 soldiers/day KIA/WIA.

Here's an idea: "A Farmer of One," or "Be all the farmer you can be," or "Not stronger. Farmer stronger." And offer starting yearly incomes matching that of Uncle Sam, and "recruit" at malls and colleges and high schools and GED seminars and the local pokey and rehabs. Think as many would join the Farmers as enlist? Or, offer enlistees the same wage as the average immigrant farm laborer - what's it up to now, $4/hour? Think recruitment's a problem now?

Are we willing to pay higher prices for food so that farm workers might earn at least a "surviving" wage and, hence, encourage more non-immigrant labor? Or should we just say screw it and double our Chinese food imports? (My cat votes a big no on the China food thing...)

It is really very difficult to argue with the author, although some tried. The right wing thinks in sound bites, not in genuine thoughts based on reality. Some of the other side also uses this short cut, witness the constant reference to agribusiness, greed, living wage, etc. Obviously Mr. Masumoto is not agribusiness in the sense of Cargill, and as other farmers have menitioned, "How can I pay medical insurance for my workers when I can't afford it for my own family?" Unless consumers are willing to pay about twice to three times what they are now paying for food, there is no way that people like Mr. Masumoto can pay wages competitive with businesses that produce higher value products.

For those of you who feel that there is something different about an undocumented worker, here is the difference. They have a higher employment rate and a lower incarceration rate than citizens. In relation to what they take out of society, their taxes more than cover it because they pay SS and Medicare but get no benefit from them, and they pay school (property) taxes the same as everyone else, directly or indirectly. They don't get refunds from their income tax withholding the way other people do, so in general, people who complain about them are parasitizing them twice, once from their underpaid work and once from their taxes.

As for Mr. Masumoto changing his workers once they get livable wages, the argument that workers from somewhere else will be treated differently holds water like a sieve. If you pay your workers a given wage, it won't matter where they come from. A worker is a worker.

There are many things that could be done to help the situation. One of them is to take the load for medical insurance off the backs of the employers and bring in a single payer system through Medicare or whatever. A second thing to do is take the load for education off the local system and put it on a higher level, state or national. And a third thing is to completely detach wages and taxes from citizenship status. The law should make it clear that immigration status has nothing to do with how well you get paid, whether you benefit from services paid for with your taxes, whether you get tax refunds, whether you count as in-state for tuition, or any other similar benefit.

"White people won't bend over" Grade-A Bullshit.

I'm white, and can tell you that 2 of the 5 industrial type jobs I've had required frequent bending. One was as a picker to load trucks with food for fast food places. It sucked, and picking tomatoes from the floor was actually part of my job, the big difference being that it was in 33 degree F weather. Don't even ask about the 40lb boxes of taco meat in the 1 degree F freezer... I left that job not out of dignity or pride, but because I hurt myself, and they didn't want me back because of it.

But I digress, the other was a job in a factory that made cardboard boxes, mostly for the auto industry. I spent weeks crawling around on the ground stapling cardboard boxes together to put automobile transmissions in. I felt THAT job after nearly being hit by a drunken 16 year old forklift driver. That place was a disaster waiting to happen anyways. OSHA would have shut it down in a heartbeat.

Another point, my family in my hometown are heavily involved with the local laborers union, the variety of jobs they do is astounding. White people WILL bend, they'll also crawl, run, sit, stand, drive, climb, sweep, whatever. So will black people. Mexicans too, and asians, etc. It's amazing how much the races really have in COMMON, no?

The problem REALLY does boil down to a living wage. Honestly. Many people I know would be willing to pick peaches or tomatoes, they just won't do it for 3 dollars an hour. And ya know what I think about food prices? I think that once a locally grown food economy took place you'd find that transportation costs were hurting more than wages. That last bit is blind supposition though, so don't hold me to it.

peachmcd and hounddog:
It's just a simple fact: white people won't bend over. I see it all the time here in Colorado. People are simply accustomed to being removed from the food growing process. It's a joke.

I work part-time on an organic farm. The pay is miserly because the margins are so small. After all, they're in direct competition with agribusiness and the grocery chains.

So unless you're buying ALL of your vegetables from locally grown sources, then your arguments don't carry water. Buying only locally grown organic food is the ultimate practice of democracy. And it will change the system you complain about; and clean the air, land and water in a few seasons.

The organic farm I work on is always freaked out that Immigration is going to come and bust them. They have 3 migrants who work on the farm. Contrary to what you believe, it is about immigration and how we treat them. Minimum wage on a farm beats minimum wage in Mexico any day.

Let's treat these immigrants just the way we would want to be treated were the shoe on the other foot.

As I read this piece the thought occurred to me that this whole argument is a con game. Once Mr. Matsumoto's current immigrants get their living wage, he and his fellow agribusinessmen will simply go after some other peoples to exploit and rationalize it in the name of maximizing profits.

Eventually we will see East Asians harvesting California fruit and vegtable crops and West Africans picking Florida citrus just like poor Latinos are replacing the African American rent-a-slaves that used to make New Orleans run.

It is time all Americans realized that if it takes paying higher prices for our food, and taxing the daylight out of extortionate profits being made by middle men that we need to do so to make sure that the gap between the poorest and wealthiest is narrowed.

The immigration problem points out the fact that we live in one interconnected world. That the world's problems are our own. And that all developed countries can do to change things is to become good examples within themselves for underdeveloped countries to follow. We can help them if they want us to, by educating their poor instead of exploiting them, raping their countries and when when the inevitable blowback hits, reacting by demonizing, imprisoning and killing them.

Cut out the middlemen and you could pay farmworkers a decent, living wage for the toughest work there is.

I think paying a wage sufficient to support a decent standard of living for agricultural workers would mean far fewer of us could afford to eat the way we do. Not that farm workers, immigrant or not, don't deserve more for their labors. I can't afford the tasteless rocks that pass for peaches in my grocery now. The best tasting peach I get now comes from a can. Is that sad, or what? This is just another argument in favor of supporting locally grown, and affordable, food products.

I'll second Hounddog's call for a living wage for ALL work in the US. The author's claim that American (read: 'white') people won't do this work, even if it's better paid, is both disingenuous and specious.

Try paying a living wage and see what happens. In the FDR era, agricultural labor was specifically exempted from the new Minimum Wage law to satisfy the Southern Senators who represented big growers' lobbies. without those votes, the minimum wage would've been defeated, and FDR knew it.

So he left the (mostly black) migrant farmworkers out, to get the (mostly white) manufacturing and retail sector workers a living wage.

After over 10 years of no raise in the Minimum Wage at all, it's become a joke. Time for a complete overhaul, to make ALL full time labor in the US pay a wage upon which a person can live decently.

The fact that it would take care of the 'illegal immigration problem' (read: xenophobic response to Capital's requirement for slave labor) is gravy.

Peach McD in Durham NC

Mr Masumoto
Why must the only people capable of farm labor be immigrants? Why can't a citizen of this country be able to make a living in agriculture as a farm laborer? Why do we allow the only industry vital to life to be exploited by agribusiness greed? Organic sustainable agriculture is suposed to provide a living wage to it's workers.
Under our trade agreements we can move our farming operations to another country,exploit labor differences, use massive amounts of fuel to move the commodity back to our corporate retailers so that some yuppie can feel good about buying organic.
Why is a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher more valuable in our society than the individual that picks our food?
I don't think the issue is illegal immigration. The issue is being paid a wage that allows an individual to make a living which includes such luxuries as a home, utilies, transportation, health insurance, clothing etc.
If agribusiness had to pay the real cost of it's labor and not transfer those costs to society there would be no shortage of workers to pick their crops.
I have worked as a farm laborer and a construction laborer all my life. It's never been about not wanting to do the work. It's been about wanting to be paid for the work we do.
Get rid of these horrible trade agreements that pit workers from one country against another.Create a just economy that doesn't exploit labor.
I don't hate anyboby that is doing the work. I hate the people that create the conditions of exploitation.
sincerely
hounddog

And of course Mr. Matsumoto pays for his workers' medical care when they are injured on his farms or in his orchards. He also pays for their education, and provides them transportation as needed since the workers don't have driver licenses. When his workers commit crimes in our country he certainly pays his workers' legal bills and pays compensation to the crime victims. Mr. Matsumoto in fact pays ALL of the social costs that go with having "undocumented workers" in this country. If only ALL employers of "undocumented workers" were as conscientous as Mr. Matsumoto.