New York Times
By Jennifer Medina
March 29, 2014
HURON,
Calif. — When Chuck Herrin, who runs a large farm labor contracting
company, looks out at the hundreds of workers he hires each year to tend
to the countless rows
of asparagus, grapes, tomatoes, peaches and plums, he often seethes in
frustration.
It
is not that he has any trouble with the laborers. It is that he, like
many others in agriculture here, is increasingly fed up with immigration
laws that he says prevent
him from fielding a steady, reliable work force.
“What
we have going on now is a farce — a waste of time and money,” said Mr.
Herrin, a lifelong Republican who grew up in central California, adding
that the country should
be considering ways to bring workers in, not keep them out. “We need
these people to get our food to market.”
California
is home to an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants, more than in
any other state. Perhaps nowhere else captures the contradictions and
complications of
immigration policy better than California’s Central Valley, where
nearly all farmworkers are immigrants, roughly half of them living here
illegally, according to estimates from agricultural economists at the
University of California, Davis.
That
reality is shaping the views of agriculture business owners here, like
Mr. Herrin, who cannot recall ever voting for a Democrat. In dozens of
interviews, farmers
and owners of related businesses said that even the current system of
tacitly using illegal labor was failing to sustain them. A work force
that arrived in the 1990s is aging out of heavy labor, Americans do not
want the jobs, and tightened security at the
border is discouraging new immigrants from arriving, they say, leaving
them to struggle amid the paralysis on immigration policy. No other
region may be as eager to keep immigration legislation alive.
The
tension is so high that the powerful Western Growers Association, a
group based in Irvine, Calif., that represents hundreds of farmers in
California and Arizona, says
many of its members may withhold contributions from Republicans in
congressional races because of the party’s stance against a
comprehensive immigration overhaul.
Mr.
Herrin says he is constantly shifting his work force during harvest,
and can often provide crews only half the size that farmers request.
Like other employers interviewed,
he acknowledged that he almost certainly had illegal immigrants in his
work force. Would-be workers provide a Social Security number or a
document purporting they are eligible to work; employers accept the
documentation even if they doubt its veracity because
they want to bring in their crops.
“We
have no choice,” he said. “We are not getting people who are coming out
of the towns and cities to come out and work on the farms.” Potential
workers, he said, are
“scared to come, scared of Border Patrol and deportations and drug
lords. They can’t afford to risk all these things.”
Roughly
a third of Mr. Herrin’s workers are older than 50, a much higher
proportion than even five years ago. He said they had earned the right
to stay here. “If we keep
them here and not do anything for them once they get old, that’s really
extortion,” he said.
The
region has relied on new arrivals to pick crops since the time of the
Dust Bowl. For more than two decades after World War II, growers here
depended on braceros, Mexican
workers sent temporarily to the United States to work in agriculture.
Today, many fieldworkers are indigenous people from southern Mexico who
speak Mixtec and know little English or Spanish.
In
recent years, farm owners have grown increasingly fearful of labor
shortages. Last year, the diminished supply of workers led average farm
wages in the region to increase
by roughly $1 an hour, according to researchers at U.C. Davis who have
tracked wages for years. Now, farm owners are pressing to make it easier
for would-be immigrants to obtain agricultural visas, which they say
would create a more reliable labor supply.
A
report released this month by the Partnership for a New American
Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, two
business-oriented groups that are
lobbying Congress, said foreign-grown produce consumed in the United
States had increased by nearly 80 percent since the late 1990s. The
report argues that the labor shortages make it impossible for American
farmers to increase production and compete effectively
with foreign importers. While the amount of fresh produce consumed by
Americans has increased, domestic production has not kept pace, and the
report attributes a $1.4 billion annual loss in farm income to the lack
of labor.
So
even amid a record drought threatening to wipe out crops here, growers
routinely talk of immigration as a top concern, saying they are losing
some of their most valuable
workers because of deportations or threats of being sent away. Kevin
Andrew, the chief operating officer for Jakov P. Dulcich and Sons, which
grows grapes and other produce in the region, remembers what happened
to one of his workers who was simultaneously
up for a promotion and citizenship a couple of years ago.
“Just
as he goes to his final interview, they found some document where his
two last names were reversed and they came after him for attempting to
defraud the government,”
Mr. Andrew said. “This is a guy who owned two or three homes, had
stellar letters written for him by supervisors, and they’re looking for a
reason to count him out.
“He
came to me afterward and was crushed, just sobbing like a baby. All of a
sudden he can’t be a supervisor because he’s wanted by the government.
He was supposedly living
the American dream, and they just took everything away in an instant.”
Mr. Andrew saw the man several months later, working at a job that paid less than what he had been earning for years.
Huron
is part of an unusual congressional district: It is more than
two-thirds Latino and is represented by a Republican, David Valadao. No
other district represented
by a Republican has more illegal immigrants. Mr. Valadao and
Representative Jeff Denham, who represents a northern stretch of the
agricultural valley, are two of the three Republicans who support a
Democratic-sponsored bill that would grant a legal path to
citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.
“There
are people who have been employed for many years, if not decades, and
are now turning to their employers saying, ‘Look, I am undocumented,’ ”
Mr. Denham said in
an interview. “These are not just seasonal workers. These are people
who have almost become part of the same family. It’s a problem that has
grown so big and so multigenerational, we can no longer ignore it.”
After
decades of immigration, the region has become home to many of the
children of Mexican laborers. Mr. Denham, for example, is married to the
daughter of a former bracero
from Mexico who became a citizen decades after he arrived in the
Central Valley.
Industry
groups are among the most important forces pressing Congress for an
immigration overhaul. Tom Nassif, the president of the Western Growers
Association, has shuttled
to Washington to press members of Congress, especially Republicans, to
get a bill passed this year. Mr. Nassif, an ambassador to Morocco under
President Ronald Reagan, has long called for easing entry at the Mexican
border to make it easier for growers to
find labor.
“We’ve
had secure borders with Mexico for the last decade; we don’t have that
argument at this point,” Mr. Nassif said. “Now we want people to see the
real damage of not
doing anything, which is a declining work force, and it means losing
production to foreign countries.”
After
the 2012 presidential election, as Republicans spoke enthusiastically
about the need to court Latinos, Mr. Nassif was optimistic that
immigration would become a
top priority. But exasperation has replaced his confidence in recent
months, and he said his group could withhold hundreds of thousands of
dollars in congressional races in which it has usually supported
Republicans.
“I
can tell you if the Republicans don’t put something forward on
immigration, there is going to be a very loud hue and cry from us in
agriculture,” Mr. Nassif said. “We
are a tremendously important part of the party, and they should not
want to lose us.”
Joe
Del Bosque grew up in the San Joaquin Valley after his parents came to
California as children during the Mexican Revolution in the early part
of the last century.
A generation ago, he said, growers often pretended to have no idea that
people working for them were not authorized to be in the United States.
Now, there is a nearly universal recognition that the industry relies
on immigrants who cross the border illegally.
Like
other growers in the area, he said he felt politically isolated. “The
employers are more frustrated than the actual immigrants,” said Mr. Del
Bosque, who grows cantaloupes,
almonds and asparagus near Los Banos, north of Fresno.
“I
thought it would have been much more contentious for them, but they are
not so demanding,” he said. “It’s not a revolution for them — it’s more
for us.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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