FRESNO BEE
April 30, 2017
As the farm labor force shrinks, some Mexican workers are being brought
in. And they’re legal
BY LEWIS GRISWOLD
CUTLER ---
Facing a shrinking pool of farm labor in the Trump era, some citrus
growers in the San Joaquin Valley have turned to a labor contractor who
brings in farmworkers from Mexico under a temporary agricultural worker
program.
Leaders in agriculture acknowledge that the program makes the migrant
workers legal under federal law, but they say it won’t create a big
enough workforce.
Critics say the temporary agricultural worker visa program, called H-2A,
could result in the abuses workers faced under the old bracero program.
And it might not matter in the long run, since there likely will be
fewer migrant workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico.
Use of H-2A labor is not widespread, but it is growing. More foreign
agricultural workers are coming into California under the program and
it’s likely that more will be seen in the Valley.
Since February, about 120 Mexican laborers have been harvesting oranges
in groves owned by growers affiliated with Porterville Citrus
packinghouse.
Every day except Sunday or rainy days, they work eight hours a day for
$12.57 an hour.
“It’s working well,” said Jim Phillips, general manager at Porterville
Citrus. “It’s kind of a pilot program.”
Porterville Citrus might try it again next year if the costs to the
growers are not too high, he said.
Other citrus farmers are watching the experiment to see if it could work
for them.
“There’s a lot of eyeballs on what they are doing,” said farmer Thomas
Wollenman of Exeter, noting that initial reports are positive.
Finding enough farmworkers during peak harvest times has become more
difficult for farmers in recent years, and rhetoric by the Trump
administration about illegal immigration and border walls is causing
some farmers to worry that farmworkers might not show up this year for
fear of being arrested in a roundup by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agents.
“It’s obviously a concern,” said Ryan Jacobsen, executive director of
the Fresno County Farm Bureau. “We need a labor force.”
But H-2A is not the answer to agriculture’s farm labor needs, he said.
What’s needed is immigration reform, he said.
“We need a replacement for H-2A,” he said. “This is an issue on the
national scale. We haven’t seen a fix for 30 years.”
Under the visa program, an employer can bring in foreign agricultural
workers if certain criteria are met.
The employer must provide transportation to and from the country of
origin, free housing, demonstrate a lack of domestic agricultural labor
for hire, and pay a high-enough wage – called the adverse effect wage
rate – not to undercut the local labor market.
Temporary workers can be in the United States for up to one year and
cannot go looking for work elsewhere. They don’t have to pay income or
Social Security taxes.
Critics such as Farmworker Justice say the program drives down wages and
leaves both foreign and native workers open to abuses by employers, such
as wage theft, that farmworkers suffered during the era of the bracer
guest worker program that ended in 1964.
California Rural Legal Assistance has been monitoring the H-2A program
for several years, said Cynthia Rice, director of litigation for the
nonprofit group.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of misrepresentation,” she said. “We see a
lot of violations of the California labor code.”
Foreign workers are told they’ll make more money than they actually do,
are frequently not paid for all work-related time, get their pay docked
for expenses the employer is supposed to cover, and sometimes don’t get
required rest and lunch periods, she said.
“The H-2A program is not a panacea, it’s not even a good short-term
solution,” she said. “Some type of comprehensive immigration reform is
needed.”
But there’s no question that more foreign farm labor has been coming to
California under the program. Statistics from the Department of Labor
show the number has grown from 1,598 temporary foreign farmworkers six
years ago to 8,591 in 2015.
Farmers say they don’t use the program because of costs such as housing,
paperwork and the risk that applications will be rejected and leave them
in the lurch.
The complicated process means it cannot come close to meeting
agriculture’s labor needs, said Bryan Little, director of human
resources policy at the California Farm Bureau Federation.
“There are 2.6 million farmworkers nationwide and about 200,000 are
H-2A,” he said. Florida, Georgia and North Carolina are the top three
states where it’s used, followed by California and Washington.
It’s too soon to say if a major shortage of farm labor will occur this
year, or what effect the Trump administration’s actions will have on the
supply of farm labor, he said.
The temporary workers in Porterville were hired through Fresh Harvest, a
labor contractor from the Imperial Valley that goes to Mexico to recruit
workers and undertakes the paperwork required by the H-2A program.
Steve Scaroni owns the company and is a third generation farmer who got
into labor contracting to meet the needs of the family’s fresh vegetable
farming operation. Fresh Harvest, a division of the Scaroni Family of
Companies, is the third-largest employer of foreign farm labor in the
United States.
For many years, Scaroni has brought Mexican farmworkers to the Salinas
Valley and has supplied laborers to harvest field crops around Huron and
Firebaugh.
Supplying foreign workers to the Valley’s citrus belt is new for his
company, he said.
“We think the demand will increase in citrus,” he said.
The typical farmworker from Mexico hired by Fresh Harvest is age 20 to
40, he said.
“They are here to work” because the money is good compared to Mexico, he
said. “These guys work hard. They’re very eager.”
Americans typically do not apply for farm labor jobs, but that is not
surprising, he said. Worldwide, farm labor tends to be done by migrant
workers, he said: “It’s not just a USA phenomenon.”
The crew is staying at a motel in Porterville. Housing is free but
workers pay for their own meals. A food truck comes to the orange groves
and the motel.
Workers can come and go as they wish in their free time, but Fresh
Harvest has a no-alcohol and no-drugs policy, although they can go out
for a beer as long as they don’t come back intoxicated, Scaroni said.
“They’re not slaves,” he said.
On a recent weekday, about two dozen workers took a Fresh Harvest bus
from Porterville to a citrus grove west of Cutler. Working quickly, they
loaded bin after bin with fresh-picked oranges.
When the food truck showed up for lunch, they put away their ladders as
it started to rain. After downing tacos, tortas and enchiladas from the
food truck, the rain subsided and the workers grabbed their ladders and
went back into the grove.
Despite his success with Fresh Harvest, Scaroni said, agriculture needs
comprehensive immigration reform to deal with the problem of a declining
labor pool but “that’s two or three years away.”
The trend of fewer farmworkers coming north from Mexico during harvest
season is irreversible, said agricultural economist J. Edward Taylor, a
professor at the University of California, Davis.
That’s because the economy in Mexico is improving, he said.
And as educational levels increase and birth rates decrease in Mexico,
fewer Mexicans will want farm jobs in the United States, he said.
“Farmers will have to adjust to a new world of labor scarcity,” he said.
“The U.S. farm labor supply will continue to shrink because most hired
farmworkers are from Mexico, and fewer Mexicans are growing up to be
farmworkers.”
Additionally, older farmworkers are aging out of the agricultural labor
force, further reducing the available pool.
As a result, farm wages are gradually rising and labor shortages are
likely during the peak of harvest seasons, he said.
It’s hard to know how great the shortage of farm labor really is, said
Jason Resnick, vice president and general counsel of Western Growers.
“Anecdotally, we hear from our members that there is a 20 to 30 percent
shortage of available farmworkers.”
Even more difficult to prove is what effect the fear of being arrested
by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is having on farmworkers already
here.
It is estimated that 80 percent of seasonal farm workers in California
are unable to provide documentation showing they are legal workers, said
Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League, an advocacy group
for farmers.
“We’ve got to get those workers here legalized,” he said. Still, “there
should be no shortage of farm labor this year.”
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