During the debate on immigration reform, restrictionists sneered at the idea that imported labor plays any positive role in the American economy. “Jobs Americans Won’t Do” became a mocking by-word.
Well, they won the political debate. The Wall Street Journal [link probably for subscribers only] reports some of the results:
Peak harvest season is approaching in much of the country, and the biggest issue on the minds of many growers isn’t the weather but how in the world they’ll get their crops from the vine or off the tree. Thanks to Congress's immigration failure, farmers nationwide are facing their most serious labor shortage in years.
The problem was bad enough last year that some 20% of American agricultural products were stranded at the farm gate. And it’s looking even worse this year, with estimates of crop losses in California, America’s largest agricultural producer, estimated to hit 30%. This spring, labor shortages forced Michigan growers to leave asparagus rotting in the fields, while farmers in North Carolina lost nearly a third of their cucumber crop last year. They’re growing fewer cukes this summer. In Washington state, the apple harvest begins in mid-August, but growers can’t find the workers they need now to thin the crop so trees don’t set more fruit than they can support; the cherry harvest is taking all the available hands.
The labor shortage is especially acute in “specialty crops” like fruits, nuts and vegetables. They constitute about half of the nation's overall crop value but require about three-quarters of all farmlabor. . . .
Migrant workers, often illegal, have picked American crops for decades, crossing the U.S. border during the harvest season and returning home when the work was done. This farm labor system operated almost as its own informal guest-worker program.
But a more heavily fortified southern border and government immigration raids have busted up this efficient North American labormarket. . . .
By the way, this turns out to be a good test of the Lou Dobbs theory of labor economics, or the proposition that illegals are “stealing” jobs that Americans would otherwise do. Immigration restrictionists claim that if only illegal labor vanished, U.S. employers would raise wages and Americans would flock to Yuma to pick lettuce.
In the real world, Americans are already employed at other jobs, and growers can only afford to pay so much and stay competitive. So instead the labor shortage is increasing pressure on U.S. growers to move production offshore. According to Tim Chelling of the Western Growers Association, whose 3,000 members in California and Arizona generate half of the nation’s fresh produce, “there’s a quiet exodus going on already, tens of thousands of acres and millions of dollars in economic activity.”
A number of large-scale growers have moved chunks of their operations south of the border to places like Mexicali Valley, Ensenada, Caborca, Guanajuato and Baja. That means the U.S. will be importing more artichokes and other high-value products. If the U.S. can’t import foreign workers to help harvest American farm products, the U.S. will have to import more foreign farm products harvested by foreign workers. Either that, or Americans will pay a lot more for fruits and vegetables as their supply shrinks.
But perhaps Mr. Dobbs and Rep. Tancredo and Mark Krikorian will volunteer to pick artichokes themselves.
Further reading: John Tabin, “Enforcement Is Not Enough”:
The problem is that beefed up enforcement by itself, to the extent that it’s effective, threatens to hamstring an economy with a demonstrably growing demand for labor. From 2002 to 2006, a period of consistently low unemployment, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 1.8 million new permanent immigrants entered the U.S. annually – about a half million of them illegally. As cases of crops that have gone unpicked following crack-downs on illegal farm workers vividly illustrate, America has a shortage of legal labor. Raising immigration quotas by forty to fifty percent would make enforcement a much easier job; as legal immigrants fill the jobs currently being filled by their illegal counterparts, many of the latter will simply leave on their own.
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