YAKIMA – While much of the United States frets about too many illegal immigrants, farmers in Washington state’s apple-growing region complain they can no longer find enough.
During the last two years, Yakima-area growers were so short of the migrant field hands they rely upon to prune and pick their crops that a few brought in workers from Thailand.
Others said they never did find enough workers, and watched in anguish as fruit left dangling on trees rotted.
This summer, with farmers expecting a bountiful apple crop, they predict the worker shortage will worsen, threatening a hand-harvested industry valued at more than $1.5 billion. In the last big-crop year, growers employed an estimated 42,300 seasonal apple workers, according to state officials.
“I hear people saying we don’t have enough workers now,” said family apple farmer Larry Knudson. And April is a slow month, he added. “If that’s now, what is it going to be like when we ratchet up our seasonal programs in June?”
The farmers’ labor problems are at least partly due to tightening of security along the U.S.-Mexico border. But they also illuminate a new reality: Illegal immigrants are shunning agricultural work in favor of better-paying opportunities.
The employers who are hiring illegal immigrants away from farmers, notably in construction and manufacturing, often pay poor wages for backbreaking tasks. But they offer steadier hours than seasonal farm work, which has served as the first job in America for countless newcomers over the last century.
“The trend line on labor supply, it’s going down,” said Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League. “If a grower can have people that come into his or her ranch on their own dime, who show (citizenship) documents that appear to be legitimate, it’s never going to get better than that. The alternative, guest worker programs, is always going to be more expensive. But that’s the only real alternative.”
Citing field hand shortages in communities such as Yakima, national agribusiness organizations are lobbying Congress for a dramatically expanded and simplified guest worker program, arguing that constricting illegal immigration without ensuring an alternative supply of cheap labor would lead to economic ruin for many farmers.
Such a proposal, called AgJobs, is part of the primary immigration bill the Senate is considering and has garnered bipartisan support among Western governors and members of Congress. Supporters say a simplified guest worker program is crucial to guaranteeing a domestically grown food supply, because without it, many crops, including lettuce, apples and grapes, will no longer be cultivated in this country.
But some worker advocates as well as illegal immigration opponents question whether there is a true dearth of agricultural laborers, arguing that farmers would find ample help if they paid better.
Apple workers, like most fruit pickers, are typically paid by the amount they harvest instead of hourly. According to statistics compiled by the state, in 2004 agriculture workers averaged about $8,600 a year for about 810 hours of labor – the equivalent of about $10.40 an hour.
Although it is not clear how many apple pickers are in the country illegally – farmers insist that the workers typically show valid-looking immigration documents – the U.S. government has estimated that about 70 percent of such seasonal agricultural workers are in fact illegal immigrants.
Some economists have questioned whether the federal government should be propping up labor-intensive farm operations that would have had to adapt long ago to survive if they had not benefited from low-cost illegal immigrant workers.
Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California in Davis, said that if the government succeeded in cutting off the influx of illegal immigrants, officials would need to provide some farmers with an expanded guest worker program for them to stay in business.
But for the program to be successful over the long run and not just create a new form of indentured servitude, Martin said it would have to compel the farmers to phase out foreign workers and find better ways to harvest their crops.
Martin is fond of noting that tomato farmers predicted doom when the federal government ended the bracero guest worker program, which began in 1942 because of labor shortages created by World War II and continued until 1964.
Instead of foundering, the nation’s tomato industry mechanized its harvesting processes and today produces roughly five times more tomatoes with one-tenth as many workers.
“The government is not going to hand (farmers) big capital losses, which is what would happen in a place like Yakima” if illegal immigration suddenly ended, Martin said.
“Maybe machines could only shake loose 60 percent of the apples on a tree, less than what workers harvest,” he added. “But a technological advance like that could still end up being more profitable if it cut labor costs.”
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