This country has always had a hypocritical relationship with the undocumented workers who fuel America’s agriculture, construction, and service industries.
On the one hand, we cannot function without them. Meanwhile, xenophobic politicians, when serving their own purposes, incite fear and mistrust among workers at the bottom of the economy.
And while voters may be angry about all sorts of things, they often find it easier to blame outsiders for problems that have nothing to do with them, such as inflation.
But we cannot deceive ourselves. President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to deport as many illegal immigrants as possible will be devastating to our economy, our prices, and the people who come to this country to harvest our fruits and vegetables and build our country. There may be consequences. I go home and wash the dishes.
California, where some economists estimate half of its 900,000 farm workers are undocumented immigrants, will be particularly hard hit.
Joe Del Bosque, 75, has been growing cantaloupe, almonds and asparagus on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley for decades. During the picking season, his workforce swells to 200 people, none of whom are native-born whites. Some of his employees have lived in the U.S. on “temporary protected status” for years, some have green cards, and others have documentation that meets the minimum federal requirements. I was able to submit it.
“Many of these agricultural jobs are not wanted by the American people,” Del Bosque told me Wednesday. “And I don’t blame them. Hard labor in extreme conditions is something many people aren’t willing to do for any pay.”
He also said the work is seasonal. Farm workers move from crop to crop depending on the time of the year.
“The people who do this work move from one farm to another,” Del Bosque said. “Who can work in this country for three months and make a living? That’s not easy.”
The prospect of widespread immigration raids and deportations is sending chills down the spines of farmworkers and their bosses. Many of them remember a time about 10 years ago when crops were rotting in the fields due to lack of employment.
“We need to come together and agree that we need some form of immigration reform, especially for essential workers,” Del Bosque said. “They feed the country. There’s nothing more essential than that.”
He recalled that in the mid-1980s, when he was managing cantaloupe fields, federal pilots would fly small planes over the state’s farmland, looking for large numbers of workers. Pilots radioed information about the workers to the ground, and vans full of immigration agents raided farms to, in Del Bosque’s words, “capture as many people as possible.”
One attack he witnessed ended in tragedy. Two of the farm workers fleeing from the water station jumped into an aqueduct at the edge of the field and attempted to swim away.
“One didn’t make it,” Del Bosque said. “He drowned on the spot. They pulled him out, but he died. They held a hearing in Merced and some of us came to testify about what happened. I remember. But I don’t think anything came of it.”
Human Rights Watch reports that 15 migrant farm workers are known to have drowned in Central Valley canals during immigration raids between 1974 and 1986. Immigrant rights groups have accused Border Patrol agents of intentionally leading workers into irrigation canals and using them as barriers to prevent them from fleeing.
Border Patrol vehicles at the time did not carry any life-saving equipment, “suggesting callousness, if not criminal negligence,” Human Rights Watch argued. In 1984, Border Patrol officials belatedly announced that agents would be required to carry life-saving equipment when working near rivers and canals.
Without a doubt, this country’s immigration system is broken. It is illegal to hire undocumented workers, but employers hire them anyway because they cannot function without this human capital. With rare exceptions, governments turn a blind eye. In fact, my colleague Don Lee recently wrote, the likelihood that an employer will be subject to an immigration inspection is “even lower than the likelihood that a taxpayer will be subject to an Internal Revenue Service inspection.”
Lee’s talk focused on E-Verify, a computer-based program that allows employers to easily, almost instantly, and free of charge verify the legal status of prospective employees.
The problem, Lee reported, is that most employers don’t take advantage of it. They just don’t want to know that their workers are in the country illegally. They desperately need labor.
The summer I graduated high school, my sister offered me a job working with her waiting tables at a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. The restaurant, Pages, was a kind of upscale diner with a long counter, pie cases, and booths along the front windows.
Rustling could often be heard in the kitchen as the Spanish-speaking men working there warned each other that “la migra” (immigration) was approaching. This was long before cell phones. I don’t know who tipped them off.
The men climbed onto the roof from inside the restaurant, waited for “everything to clear up,” and then quickly returned to bus tables to wash dishes and cook. Those arrested and deported sneak back across the border and quickly return to work, but before President Reagan’s 1986 pardon and tightened border enforcement, the border was even more porous. Ta. Bosses who encouraged or tolerated such attempts to evade the federal government usually faced no repercussions.
It was a ritual, a mostly meaningless dance, except that it was destructive and terrifyingly scary.
And this will continue to be the case unless and until Congress corrects its incredible hypocrisy toward illegal immigration by reforming our immigration system. It may be in President Trump’s best interest to continue to demonize them, but it is definitely not in our interest.
Blue Sky: @rabcarian.bsky.social.Thread: @rabcarian
