States with Highest Farm and Contract Labor
Expenses, 2002
California
Florida
Washington
Texas
Oregon
North Carolina
Wisconsin
Michigan
Minnesota
New York
Pennsylvania
Illinois
Iowa
Nebraska
Idaho
5,983
1,580
1,143
1,043
683
618
536
505
489
479
472
447
440
438
403
0
1,000
2,000
3,000
4,000
$ million
5,000
6,000
Source: ERS analysis of 2002 Census of Agriculture data.
farms that have the same migrants coming back year after
year … they are good to their workers,” said Theresa Hendricks, director of the Michigan Migrant Legal Assistance.
Michigan farm worker Pasqual Hernandez said he earns
$8 an hour and enjoys working in agriculture as his father
did in Chiapas, Mexico. He sends some of his earnings to
his family in Mexico for food and medicine, but he’s unable
to visit them. Like many immigrants, Hernandez planned
to work in the United States for a couple of years, save up
money, and return home. But the dangers of crossing the
border have dissuaded him from going back, at least for now:
“I changed opinions because I saw that a lot of people were
going…and there are some that do not return; they die in the
desert.”
Regardless of the quality of their relationships with their
employers, the primary concern of most unauthorized farm
laborers is their legal status. Among the states that employ
large numbers of unauthorized farm workers, Michigan is
one of the more hospitable, but the fear of being deported
is pervasive here, too. “The biggest difficulty is the fear one
has of being captured and being sent back to Mexico,” Hernandez said.
Robert Sierra, a farm field manager, described the difference between being authorized and unauthorized to work in
these terms: “Nothing is ever sure with the undocumented.
You don’t live peacefully; it’s hard to sleep at night. You are
fearful of investing in anything because if you are sent back
to Mexico, all that you have saved for will stay here.”
Research indicates that most workers stay in agriculture
for 10 or fewer years. But some immigrant farm workers
say that if the working conditions and pay are decent, they
wouldn’t want to do anything else. A much larger share of
the population earns a living in agriculture in Mexico than
8 Briefing Paper, December 2011
in the United States—less than 2 percent of Americans
work in agriculture. Many rural Mexicans, when they
can’t make ends meet, end up moving to Mexican cities. But some opt to leave the country for the United
States, and they often end up living and working in rural America.32
Sierra, 40, said he began working in agriculture at age
12 in Querétaro, Mexico. He came to the United States
because he couldn’t make a living in rural Mexico. “I
have always been used to working in the fields and it’s
what I know best,” he said. “You become accustomed to
it. You feel you have more freedom than in construction
or warehouses.”
Georgia
Agriculture (which includes fishing, forestry, and
hunting) is a $3.9 billion industry in Georgia. In 2009,
fruits, nuts, vegetables and ornamental horticulture—all
heavily dependent on immigrant workers—accounted for 27
percent of the state’s total farm income.33
In April 2011, Georgia passed one of the most aggressive
state immigration-enforcement laws. The legislation may
seem like a resounding victory to those opposed to the presence of unauthorized immigrants in the state, but Georgia
farmers see things much differently. “The worker shortage
really translates into a monetary loss,” said Gary Butler
[pseudonym], a fifth-generation Georgia farmer, “about a 1520 percent loss of revenues [for my farm].”
“There’s no question that we’ve seen a pretty severe shortage,” said Bryan Tolar, president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council. “Fifty percent of the labor force that we’ve
relied on… to get those fresh fruits and vegetables to the market [has left].” Georgia’s growers have a history of alarmist
rhetoric on the subject of labor shortages. But in this case,
Latino advocates in the state agree that the law has deterred
Andrew Wainer
Figure 5
A worker at a cantaloupe packing warehouse in south Georgia.