The supply of farm labor has become one of the most significant issues in U.S. immigration policy. During the early twenty-first century, the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Worker Survey reported that 77 percent of all workers on American crop farms had been born abroad, that almost half the foreign-born workers had been in the United States for fewer than five years, and that more than half were not legally authorized to work in the United States.
Commercial farms in the western United States have long depended on workers from other countries. Most foreign farmworkers stay only long enough to earn target amounts of money and then return to their home countries. Some do remain in the United States, but their American-educated children rarely follow their parents into the fields. Consequently, much of the American agricultural industry has remained on a immigration treadmill, needing constantly to recruit new foreign workers willing to accept seasonal jobs.
Farmworkers have loomed large in U.S. immigration debates. During the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. government two made exceptions to policies blocking the entry of low-skilled foreigners in order to admit Mexican farmworker in the bracero programs. The first program brought legal Mexican workers to southwestern American farms between 1917 and 1921, a migration that afterward continued practically unimpeded, despite the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1923. The second program admitted almost five million Mexican workers between 1942 and 1964 and established networks between rural Mexico and rural America that afterward continued to draw Mexican farmworkers north.
From the mid-1990’s into the early twenty-first century, about one-half of workers employed on American crop farms have not been legally authorized to work in the United States. After 2000, both farm employers and worker advocates agreed that the best way to deal with unauthorized workers in agriculture would be to legalize their immigration status and simultaneously make it easier for farmers to hire temporary foreign workers legally. In 2006, a bill called the Agricultural Job Opportunity Benefits and Security Act (AgJOBS) was included in the comprehensive immigration reform bill approved by the U.S. Senate in May, 2006. However, it was rejected in June, 2007. While running for president in 2008, Barack Obama endorsed AgJOBS, but no progress was made in getting the bill passed during the first year of his administration, largely because of resistance fromopponents of givingamnesty to undocumented immigrants.
Waves of Immigrants
During the late nineteenth century, as irrigation transformed the valleys of the western states into open-air greenhouses that produced fruits and vegetables, finding enough people to work the fields became a problem. Most leaders expected some of the immigrants then coming to the United States from eastern and southern Europe to travel by rail to California and other western states to become family farmers. Some did; however, most of the farmworkers in western states during the late nineteenth century were immigrants who were barred frommost nonfarmemployment. These included Chinese immigrants who had helped to construct the transcontinental railroad, only to be driven out of cities afterward.
During World War I, farmers persuaded the U.S. government to exempt Mexicans from restrictions imposed by the Immigration Act of 1917 to slow European immigration. On May 23, 1917, the U.S. Department of Labor, which then included the Bureau of Immigration, approved the request of western farmers “to admit temporarily otherwise inadmissible aliens” to work in agriculture and on railroads. This began the first bracero program. Under this program, almost 80,000 Mexican farmworkers came to the United States before the program was halted in 1921. Most of these people worked in cotton and sugar beet fields.
In 1931, as the Great Depression was worsening, many Mexicans who had settled in the United States were sent back to Mexico in order to open jobs for American workers. The reduction of Mexican workers in the West and dust bowl conditions in midwestern states brought a new wave of migrant farmworkers to the western states. For the first time, most newcomers to the western agricultural labor force were English-speaking American citizens. Their experiences as seasonal farmworkers would be memorialized in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath. That book and the film adapted from it helped provide an emotional impetus for farm labor reforms.
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