Undocumented Workers in the American Agri-business

With the upcoming presidential elections, there is a lot of debate on immigration and a common argument against it is that ‘immigrants are taking jobs from Americans’ – but nobody complains that their produce is cheap, and nobody aspires to work on a farm. It’s true that if the prices of produce in American grocery stores reflected the true cost of production, fruits and vegetables would be a lot more expensive than they are. Because farms and the agricultural industry can pay immigrants cheap wages, provide no benefits and poor working conditions, it is a lot less expensive to hire illegal immigrants rather than American citizens. This problem has some interesting perspectives and points, some of which I will point out in this post.

Illegal immigrants that work on farms in the United States are at high risk for exploitation, and benefits, wages and poor working conditions. There are an estimated 2-3 million farm workers in the United States, and at least 6 out of 10 workers are undocumented (Southern Poverty Law Center). Laborers are exposed to pesticides, have horrible housing conditions, abuse in their workplace and are paid between $12,500 and $14,999 annually – barely enough to feed their families.

A very interesting part of this debate is that there are in fact not enough American citizens who are trained and willing to work in the agricultural business. A campaign was launched by the United Farm Workers union with the goal of providing jobs for unemployed people on farms – but of the thousands of inquiries sent out, only three people accepted the agricultural jobs. In Benjamin Shute’s New York Times article, “We Need a New Generation of American Farmers”, he describes how farmers already offer jobs with housing, transportation and good wages to U.S. citizens, but there is little to no interest at all.

Marco Saavedra, an activist for immigrants that were brought to the United States illegally by their parents when they were young children, wrote a piece in the New York Times about his personal struggle being an undocumented immigrant. He brings up an interesting point about the cycle of immigration. The United States’ demand for illegal drugs such as marijuana and cocaine causes the rise of drug cartels in Central and South America, in turn feeding violence and poverty and “turning barrios into battlegrounds” and forcing people to immigrate – however, immigrants are treated harshly when they relocate to the United States for safer and better opportunities (Saavedra). Moreover, when cheap government-subsidized corn was introduced to the market in Mexico around 1994, many corn farmers in Mexico lost their jobs and had to relocate to look for work – many went to the United States (NFWM). But here, immigrants are marginalized and criminalized (Saavedra also notes that the criminalized and marginalized immigrants are not the ones from first-world countries, nor are they the wealthy immigrants – they are the low income immigrants from Central and South America). Thankfully, the government is discussing some policies that may help with the issue of exploitation on farms.

AgJOBS, a proposed immigration law, is aimed to protect farmworkers from being exploited and also provide farm employers with a stable and legal work force. AgJOBS would allow undocumented agricultural workers who have had previous work experience to obtain temporary immigration status, and eventually become permanent residents if they continued agricultural work.  This is an interesting and positive suggestion that would satisfy the farmers by maintaining the number of employers on their farms, and would satisfy the immigrants by allowing them to become legal permanent residents. By being legal, immigrants would be able to have basic rights such as the ability to get a driver’s license or a higher education.

In Saavedra’s piece on being an undocumented alien, he discusses an interesting piece of philosophy called the Thomas theorem, which says that “if a phenomenon is deemed real, it will have real consequences”. This essentially means that if immigration is perceived as a problem in society, there will be real consequences for immigrants – even if economics and rights prove that there is no problem. This is interesting philosophy to consider related to the immigration debate, as well.

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SOURCES

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/08/17/could-farms-survive-without-illegal-labor/we-need-a-new-generation-of-american-farmers

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/09/03/is-immigration-really-a-problem-in-the-us/as-an-undocumented-alien-first-generation-college-grad-i-am-a-problem

http://www.voanews.com/content/us-farmers-depend-on-illegal-immigrants-100541644/162082.html

http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/summary-agjobs-agricultural-job-opportunities-benefits-and-security-act-2007

http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/farm-workers-immigration/

 

2 thoughts on “Undocumented Workers in the American Agri-business

  1. Amber Kovacik says:

    This article is interesting because I saw a video (a Donald Trump video, of course) about if all immigrants actually left America. Though immigrants benefit from about 10% of the social security and taxes they pay into, the US profits off of the other 90%! We would lose so much money from that alone, that any benefits in the US would go down the toilet for the actual citizens. Along with agriculture prices rising, so would fast food restaurants- as they often hire immigrants “under the table” for below minimum wage. Immigrants come here to work, and without them prices would skyrocket. Though it is unfair to be paying someone such cheap, barely livable wages, it is absolutely necessary for the economy.

  2. Sabrina Qiao says:

    Samantha, this is a well-written and researched piece offering a diverse view on the current outlook on immigration and the consequences of some of the attitudes that are being spread about immigration today. In particular, I thought the points you made about how “cheap” labor affects the prices of goods in our economy to be really interesting and a very good look at the effect of immigrant labor.

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