Farm workers by the numbers

This USDA ERS report on hired farm workers provides much context to the debate about immigration reform. From the Amber Waves feature:

For the U.S., the total farm labor expense in 2006 was $24.4 billion—amounting to 10.2 percent of total agricultural commodity cash receipts. But, in California, which has the greatest cash receipts of all States and produces many labor-intensive crops (such as dairy, grapes, and greenhouse and nursery), total farm labor expense amounted to 22.3 percent of the total value of agricultural cash receipts for 2006. In contrast, in Iowa, farm labor expense totaled 2.5 percent of cash receipts. Iowa has the third highest total cash receipts but grows primarily non-labor-intensive agricultural commodities (such as corn, hogs, and soybeans). Six States—California, Florida, Washington, Texas, Oregon, and North Carolina—account for about half of the Nation’s expenditure on hired labor.



On unauthorized workers:

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Study (NAWS), roughly half of crop farmworkers are not authorized to work in the United States. Because the number of unauthorized low-skill immigrants in the U.S. far exceeds immigration quotas, the immigrants’ opportunities to obtain legal status depend almost entirely on changes in U.S. immigration policy. U.S. farm operators likewise rely on immigration policy for guidance on employment decisions. Immigrants who arrived after 1990 were ineligible to qualify for legal status under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). This legislation granted legal status to those who have lived in the U.S. since 1982 or who could prove they engaged in agricultural employment between 1985 and 1986. Because no major legislation has offered legal status to unauthorized immigrants since IRCA, immigrants arriving after 1990 are far more likely to be unauthorized.

Unauthorized workers appear in greater proportions in agriculture than in other industries. Current and widely cited estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center place the entire unauthorized workforce at 7 million workers in 2006. Of these, an estimated 500,000 are employed as hired farmworkers at any given point in time. But, because different workers often work at the same location at different times of the year, the estimated total number of unauthorized workers employed in agriculture throughout a year is likely to be greater.

According to the NAWS data, since 1989, a substantial portion of crop farmworkers have consistently reported they expected to remain in farmwork for the for seeable future. However, several studies based on the experience with IRCA suggest that if unauthorized workers were granted legal status, they would be less likely to take seasonal agricultural production jobs and agricultural wages would increase significantly. Hence, those employing seasonal workers would face the greatest financial challenges resulting from labor market constriction due to immigration reform. Farm operators are likely to adjust over time by acquiring additional capital equipment, switching commodities, or possibly ceasing agricultural production.

Opponents of additional immigration restrictions believe that imposing them would jeopardize the supply of labor available to farmers during critical planting and harvest seasons. They contend that if restrictive immigration policies were to occur, it could lead to reduced profits for some farms and threaten the viability of agricultural subsectors that remain heavily dependent on farm labor, especially fruit, tree nuts, vegetables, and horticulture. Others contend that little evidence supports the existence of farm labor shortages. To support their view, the latter group points to relatively slight increases in recent hired farmworker wages, greater production of labor-intensive fruit and vegetables, the small proportion of food products’ final cost attributed to labor, and increasing possibilities for agricultural mechanization. Because agriculture has not had to deal with a critical shortage of labor in the recent past, it is difficult to reconcile these two perspectives.

TK: Growers who have given up labor intensive fruit and vegetable production because of labor worries have a hard time reconciling the government's lack of action in providing growers with an adequate legal work force with their continuing ability to farm.