Of course, the real irony in all of this is that it’s an open secret that many bigger farms hire illegals for their labor, pay them less than minimal wage, house them in leaky shanties, and basically hold them hostage by thinly veiled threats about calling INS. Profitable farms cannot afford to follow every law, because they are competing in a marketplace where almost all of the winners cheat.
It is an well-known secret that the largest and most successful farm in my area extensively uses illegal immigrants for labor. They say that citizens are too unreliable and unproductive for them to be profitable.
Not to mention that a lot of farming is done by undocumented workers, who don't necessarily appear on payrolls. It's hard to find people to do hard, dangerous, exhausting work for so little pay.
Note that big farmers tend to be careful about illegal labor. When you have millions of dollars in land, you stand to lose a lot if some prosecuter is looking for an example. Smaller guys don't have as much to lose and can appear sympathetic against the big government so they are more likely to risk it.
Some assumptions: you are American and you were able to quit lettuce farm job and able to look back at those times with fondness. These farm laborers will never post on HN.
$9/hour without healthcare or benefits is not ‘lucrative’ unless we are speaking of migrant labour crews who are undocumented. Those who defend the use of undocumented labourers in Ag are simply enabling slave labour.
Unless we take a firm stand against undocumented labour, we will never have a true picture of our economy and cost of living the American life.
Considering American farms rely on undocumented labour only because it’s cheap and exploitative, we will never find Americans wanting to do these jobs. Automation is the only way out. And realistic output of Ag.
[..]“Some of you should see where these folks are living, the conditions they’re in. Living in shipping containers, making $9 an hour,” he said. “No health care, no support services.”[..]
[..]“The conditions farmworkers shared with the governor — being paid $9 an hour and living in shipping containers — are simply deplorable,” Villaseñor wrote. “Our country relies on their back-breaking work, yet Congress cannot even provide them the stability of raising their families and working in this country without fear of deportation, which contributes to their vulnerability in the workplace. That is no way to live.”[..]
Here in america farmers hire illegals to harvest crops, claiming that no american would do the work
This is a political talking point that has been repeated so often that people believe it is true.
During the recession of 2008, there were stores on local TV news in many places showing unemployed Americans waiting in long lines for the opportunity do do those jobs that the politicians kept saying no American wanted to do for those wages. Meatpacking plants, especially, had more than enough Americans to choose from who were willing to work for low wages.
Because these things happened in "flyover" states, they were only very rarely shown on television on the coasts, and so the meme stuck.
A similar oft-repeated lie is that American farmers are all a bunch of Republican hillbillies who hate brown immigrants.
Around 2010, I attended a conference in Seattle for farmers in the Pacific Northwest. The main topic of discussion was how to increase legal immigration from Mexico so that they could have more farmworkers to pick the cherries and apples and mint and whatnot. These people were talking about goals of making people from Mexico and Latin America U.S. citizens in staggering numbers.
The more you actually go places and do things and meet people and talk to them, the more you realize that the words coming out of the political organizations on the coasts are mostly for their own benefit, and do not reflect reality.
> In 2011, for example, Georgia enacted a strict immigration law that targeted undocumented workers and their employers. Later that year, the state reportedly lost eleven thousand crop workers. To fill the gap, officials established a program whereby nonviolent offenders nearing the end of their prison terms could do paid farmwork. The program had few takers, and many prisoners and probationers who did try it walked off the job, because the work was so hard. Georgia farmers lost more than a hundred and twenty million dollars.
> “It’s very expensive,” Wishnatzki said of the process of getting visas for temporary agricultural workers—they are issued under a program called H-2A —because of all the red tape and the cost of housing. (“Expensive” is a relative term: H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country.) “But at least it guarantees that we have workers, so we’re able to plant a crop,” he continued.
Farmers now have to actually house and pay their workers instead of giving them scraps under the table for back-breaking manual labor under the brutally hot Georgia summer sun? It's difficult to sympathize, to put it lightly.
Disclaimer: Hugely unscientific personal anecdote incoming.
I worked on a farm in CA as a seasonal worker and I, along with a number of my fellow laborers, were paid below CA minimum wage, and I was actually authorized to work in the US. I don't know how widespread this is but I got the impression it wasn't exactly rare.
From comparing experiences with one of my closest friends who is the son of Mexican migrant farm workers in the Central Valley, we have concluded that some farm operators specifically seek out illegal workers, not so much because the hourly wage differential is so great, but because of added savings like insurance and not having to deal with OSHA violations. Farm work an be pretty injury inducing and having a group of workers who are too scared/desperate to report worker safety violations to OSHA can be a big benefit.
For the sake of not generalizing too much, I also know someone who runs a small farm and takes things like paying legal wages and overall worker safety and well being extremely seriously. And again, this is all anecdotal.
Those are largely mega-farms run similar to mega-corporations, and they utilize a lot of immigrant labor. There are a few independent farmers around eeking out a living, but not many.
I’m one independent contractor doing engineering at one farm. I’d be surprised if I was even on whatever list was used to estimate what must be tens of thousands of farm workers in CA. In fact farm workers are so often undocumented they cannot have an accurate tally.
About half of US hired farmworkers are illegal immigrants, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.[1] It was only 12% in 1991, but passed 50% by 2000.
You can still work in the fields if you want to. Farmers are finding lots of their crops withering away and dying at harvest time because we're doing too good a job of keeping illegal immigrants out. People just refuse the work.
'a lot of them' means exactly nothing. How many? Do you have some numbers?
Last time I checked, the dept of labor was saying that about 40% of all agricultural workers are illegal immigrants and United Fresh Produce Association between 50 and 70 percent. So yeah, a lot of them don't use 'legit' systems. It must be very hard to cheer for building 'the wall' while employing illegals and getting federal subsidies. That's why I have great faith in farming automation as it would provide some well deserved relief.
Farmers is plural - there are many of them and they do not agree. The farmers hiring illegals are not the same ones against building the walls.
I do know a farmer who have stopped offering more wages when they didn't get anyone to agree to work for $25/hr - meanwhile he can find illegals who will work for $15. (Compare to what walMart pays, he isn't trying to hire engineers)
Farm employment has always been more informal, harder to track, and rife with illegal practices (child labor, illegal immigrants, minimum wage violations) that make reported data hard to trust/reason from.
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