Posted on 12/09/2006 10:08:01 AM PST by Dog Gone
J Carnes felt queasy looking out at the rows and rows of rotting cabbage heads marked by cracked black leaves. The pungent odor -- like boiling cabbage, but worse -- made him retch.
Even as the sun faded into the horizon, small clusters of migrant workers remained stooped in the fields. They moved fast, cutting the last good crops out of the dirt and dropping them into burlap sacks strapped across their chests.
But there weren't anywhere close to enough workers. And, anyway, it was already too late.
"The fields had a dark, ugly, death-look to them," Carnes recalls, "like they'd been abandoned."
Carnes (whose first name really is the letter J) and his father, Ed, oversee one of the largest fresh-market vegetable shipping plants in Texas. They're based in Uvalde, set midway between San Antonio and Mexico in an area home to thousands of acres of commercial vegetable farms.
This spring marked the first time growers in the region couldn't find enough workers to harvest their crops.
Carnes estimates the size of his work force dropped by 40 percent -- a figure supported by several other area farmers. He lost a half-million cabbage heads and large sections of onion fields, costing the company some $250,000.
"Finding workers is always a headache," Carnes says, "but this is the worst I've seen it."
Fruit and vegetable growers across the country have come forward with similar stories.
Millions of dollars have been lost on unpicked apples in New York, oranges in Florida and pears in northern California. Even farmers within a stone's throw from the Rio Grande -- including growers of cantaloupes in South Texas and lettuce in Southern California -- complain their crops have turned to mush because they can't find workers.
Many blame federal immigration policies enacted since 9/11 -- including business raids, beefed-up border patrols and calls for a border wall -- and fret that their industry will be wiped out unless they can bring in more foreign workers. But their cries for a guest-worker program have gone nowhere.
In September Carnes flew to Washington, D.C. to rally with hundreds of other disgruntled farmers. A buttoned-down Republican in a largely conservative industry, Carnes is an unlikely activist. "We're not the picket-line types," he insists, wincing at any suggestion that he marched on Washington.
But he stood on the Capitol lawn holding a basket of fresh produce to show what's at stake if Mexicans can't cross the border. Other farmers chanted and raised banners, predicting the collapse of American agriculture.
"We're at the edge of a very serious situation," says Ray Prewett, head of the Texas Vegetable Association, which represents 250 commercial farmers statewide. "If we can't get labor, we can't operate."
Desperate for field workers, Bernie Thiel turned to Spanish-language AM radio. Last summer he ran a dozen ads every day for a month, offering a pay bonus to anyone who stayed through the entire harvest season.
Few showed up. And the ones who did stuck around for a couple days, then disappeared.
"Americans absolutely will not do this type of work," says Thiel, a commercial vegetable farmer for 35 years based in Lubbock and the state's largest grower of fresh-market squash.
Ask Thiel or most any other farmer if they hire undocumented workers and you'll get an indignant "Absolutely not!" But ask them about the farmer down the road and you'll hear a very different story.
Truth is, most commercial farmers rely heavily on an illegal work force. A recent government survey estimates more than half of the country's two million farm workers are undocumented. Industry leaders say that in some areas it's often closer to 90 percent.
It's also true that Americans aren't exactly lining up to do manual labor for minimum wage. Farmers may dole out $8 to $10 an hour for a few weeks at peak harvest, but the majority of fieldworkers straddle the poverty line.
Some economists say farmers are addicted to cheap labor. A wage increase, they argue, would solve their problems.
"Americans will work in coal mines, they'll work in the most menial, dirty and dangerous jobs, but they expect to be paid accordingly," says John Keeley of the D.C. -based Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes a guest-worker program.
Farmers who can't afford to pay more, Keeley says, should close up shop: "If we come to the point when our apples come from Mexico, so be it."
Texas farmers have been barreling headlong in that direction for the last ten years thanks largely to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated tariffs on most imports. "Since NAFTA," Prewett says, "there's not a major grower or shipper in Texas who isn't working both sides of the border."
In Texas, the three major regions conducive to commercial fruit and vegetable farming are centered in Uvalde, Lubbock and the Rio Grande Valley, the narrow 60-mile strip of fertile delta at the state's southernmost tip. Farm acreage in each of these regions has shrunk significantly in recent years as growers have outsourced their operations or sold out to developers.
"We're always going to have some fruit and vegetable production in Texas but our days as a major player are ending," says Frank Dainello, a professor of horticultural sciences at Texas A&M University in College Station. "Much of it has already dwindled down to nothing."
Total acreage for fresh-market vegetables in Texas has decreased by 75 percent in the last 30 years, Dainello says. In the decade since NAFTA, it has dropped from 160,000 acres to fewer than 70,000, according to statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture.
Even in the Houston area, rice and vegetable farming was prevalent as little as 20 years ago. "It was all ranch land and rice land from Jersey Village west to the Cypress area all the way out to Katy," says William Kalbow, vice-president of the Harris County Farm Bureau Board and the operator of a small produce stand north of the city.
Texas continues to lead the country in some agricultural production, such as cotton, hay, wheat and sorghum. These crops -- as well as fresh-market produce such as carrots, green beans and spinach -- are not affected by labor shortages since they are mechanically harvested. But the technology does not yet exist for performing other tasks, such as picking off soft fruit or clipping onion roots, which must be done by hand.
Thiel, who produces three million pounds of fresh-market squash a year -- much of which is sold to H-E-B and Wal-Mart -- says the labor shortage especially hurts farmers whose crops must be picked almost immediately after maturing.
Onions, he says, have about a ten-day window for harvesting, while cantaloupes should be picked within 24 hours after ripening.
When Thiel's green and yellow zucchinis reach the desirable size, about six to eight inches, he has 48 hours to get them out of the ground. Otherwise, nobody wants them because they've grown too large. "On the third day it's a loser," he says.
Last summer, after his radio ads failed to bring in workers, Thiel spent a week hauling out five-pound, foot-long zucchinis. His losses totaled about $75,000.
"It's very emotional," he says. "You have a certain amount of time to get it done and if you don't get it done, that's it, it's over."
A lifelong Republican, John McClung served as spokesman for the USDA under Ronald Reagan, and a photo of him posing with the late president hangs prominently in his office. These days, however, his loyalties are wavering.
"I'm so unhappy with the House Republican leadership," says McClung, president of the Texas Produce Association, "I'm about ready to divorce the whole party."
McClung and other agricultural industry leaders say they felt betrayed by the Republican-led House for not passing a guest-worker program this year.
The Senate proposed a plan to reform the existing H-2A guest-worker program, which critics say is too complex and has burdensome requirements. For instance, farmers must provide workers free housing, meals and transportation. Nationwide less than three percent of agricultural workers use the visas.
The new guest-worker plan, known as AgJOBS, would let undocumented workers become legal permanent residents if they remain employed in agriculture for another three years. That would give farmers a stable work force while they transition from undocumented labor.
But with mid-term elections approaching, House leaders bowed to conservatives who think such programs steal jobs from Americans and create an underclass of foreign workers.
"Some think it's swell that brown-skinned people come to our country and work for half the wages," Keeley says. "It's a repugnant economic model, a bastardization of our immigration heritage."
The bracero program, prompted by labor shortages during World War II, was the last major guest-worker program between the American and Mexican governments. More than four million Mexicans crossed the border from 1942 to 1964, mostly to work in agriculture. Widespread reports of exploitation hardly discouraged the influx of workers, who often did not receive the housing, meals and wages they were promised.
Antonio Garcia, who was 16 when he crossed into Texas as a bracero, said his supervisors treated workers "like slaves," according to a 2003 interview he gave to the University of Texas at El Paso as part of an oral-history project. "They didn't want us to kneel or to put our hands on our knees, they would use abusive language when they addressed us and they would threaten to send us back to Mexico," Garcia recalled.
To prevent such abuses today, guest workers should have portable visas letting them transfer to different farms if problems arise, according to Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and leading advocate of immigration reform.
The next major immigration initiative occurred under Reagan, who granted amnesty to 2.6 million illegal residents. But the Immigration Reform and Control Act failed to prevent new arrivals. The estimated number of illegal immigrants in the United States has nearly tripled to 12 million since 1986, and roughly 40 percent arrived just within the last five years, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
The majority of today's illegal immigrants neither swam across the river nor trekked through the desert. Rather, they simply overstayed their visas, causing many to question the usefulness of the multibillion-dollar border wall initiative President George W. Bush recently signed into law.
Similar efforts in the '90s to close off the borders using high-tech surveillance ran into major technical and contracting debacles. A test of ground sensors showed they couldn't distinguish between animals and people, and cameras were paid for but never installed.
McClung and many farmers he represents along the border strongly oppose a border wall -- which in Texas would span east to west from Brownsville to Laredo, Del Rio to Eagle Pass and El Paso to New Mexico -- calling it an insult to Mexico, a waste of money and a strain on their livelihoods.
These issues have put farmers in a rare adversarial position with the local leaders they helped get elected.
Carnes, the cabbage farmer in Uvalde, had always voted Republican in major contests until this year. Fed up with Texas Gov. Rick Perry for campaigning on border enforcement without also stressing the need for a guest-worker program, he reluctantly decided to cast his vote for Democratic long shot Chris Bell.
"I'm leaning to the other guy," Carnes says. "What's his name? Not Kinky but the other guy."
(This in an excerpt. Read more at Houston Press)
It's a SHAME that this country supports any welfare recipients when jobs are going unfilled.
I say let the poor welfare suckups have these jobs, quit keeping the jobs from them!
***It's a SHAME that this country supports any welfare recipients when jobs are going unfilled. ***
They tried using welfare workers way back about 1964. They found real quick that some people will NOT do "stoop labor".
Do you see the irony here? They advertise on "Spanish-language radio". Is that what they call trying to find citizen workers??? No wonder they don't find any!
And it proves that they're not finding workers from the millions of illegal aliens and green card holders listening to those radio stations.
This is the best arguement I've seen to not have any more guest worker programs.
And, never went back. And, ivited millions of other mexicans to come.
The pickers are all taking jobs like construction and industry.
Oh, I know what the answer is - just open the border and let millions more in.
Or, maybe they could just use one of these:
CABBAGE HARVESTING * Designed specifically for the fresh market lifting of cabbages with no damage, neat clean cut and automated removal of unwanted external leaves. A combination of mechanically driven pick up belts and an elastic belt ensures a uniform intake and cutting of the cabbage. Available with either hydraulic fork lift for 2 x 5ookg boxes or elevator for discharge into a trailer. Both machines are fitted with cross web with room to stand 2 people.
When life gives you rotten cabbage, make kimchi.
Few showed up. And the ones who did stuck around for a couple days, then disappeared.
"Americans absolutely will not do this type of work," says Thiel
He admits right here that Americans or Mexicans won't do this work for what he wants to pay.
There are already 12 ~ 20 million illegals in the United States, how many more tens of millions are needed to pick his crop at the lowest pay possible?
So. Does tht mean he voted dem? Hmmmmm.... I thought the only reason the dems won because the anti-illegal crowd stayed home.
There is another irony. An article today on FR relates to San Francisco's woes over its homeless/jobless population. Some in city government are trying to do something about it but are getting grief from wacko libs who think people should be allowed to live the way they want.
The MSM/libs cry out about the homeless when a Republican is in office, yet farm work would put money in their pockets, possibly give them an opportunity to better themselves financially, but they're not considered a possible alternative to illegal labor.
There certainly are people available to do the work; they just aren't interested, or the growers as you've pointed out don't seek them out.
If they get hungry enough, they will.
20 million illegals (conservative estimation) and it is still not enough to these people. Sounds like jobs that illegals/prisoners will not do for minumum wage. They have learned that even Airports contractors pay better.
***If they get hungry enough, they will.***
But they didn't. The Gov't made a quick run to the border for Braceros to do the work.
So you didn't sob for that poor farmer either? But he had such a sad story, not being able to get his crop in.
I was just about to post a picture of a harvester too...
Wonder what the growers pay per hour? Not what they report paying but what they actually pay 'in cash'?
I wonder if this excuse was used during the civil war? Make people on government assistance work. Sell to people that will pick. If they can't manage their farm though, maybe they need to think about downsizing.
Serves them all right for having broken the law by employing illegals in the first place. They ought to be grateful not to have been arrested.
Do you have 'sympathy' for all criminals?
ping
Nahhh, they knew they didn't really have to.
Desperate for field workers, Bernie Thiel turned to Spanish-language AM radio. Last summer he ran a dozen ads every day for a month, offering a pay bonus to anyone who stayed through the entire harvest season.
Few showed up. And the ones who did stuck around for a couple days, then disappeared.
They are all in construction, restaraunts, hotels, etc. If you import 20 million more illegals you still won't have enough!
No illegals - period.
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